MIT News - Arts - Design - Architecture - Glass Lab - List Visual Arts Centerhttps://news.mit.edu/rss/topic/arts
MIT News is dedicated to communicating to the media and the public the news and achievements of the students, faculty, staff and the greater MIT community.enFri, 16 Nov 2018 14:40:00 -0500An Infinite solar systemhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-infinite-corridor-solar-system-1116
Professor Richard Binzel’s new Infinite Corridor installation models the solar system at scale.Fri, 16 Nov 2018 14:40:00 -0500Julia C. Keller | School of Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-infinite-corridor-solar-system-1116<p>Last week, Professor Richard Binzel led a group of MIT space enthusiasts on a tour of our solar system —&nbsp;now installed on the third floor of the Infinite Corridor.</p>
<p>With the installation, Binzel, a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), realized a decades-long dream to display the solar system to scale and spark enthusiasm for planetary and space research.&nbsp;For many years in the fall semester, Binzel taught an introductory class on the solar system in which he asked students to plot out the planets along the Infinite’s 200-meter length, which equates to one thirty-billionth the length of the solar system.</p>
<p>“My students always loved the assignment about determining planetary distance from the sun along the Infinite, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have the solar system displayed all year round?” said Binzel.</p>
<p>The sun is positioned at the far west of the corridor in Building 7. Mercury is located a mere 1.9 meters to its east. Venus is 3.6 meters away from the sun; Earth is 5.0 meters. Pluto, though its planetary status is still in question, would be 197 meters away at the corridor’s far end in Building 8.</p>
<p>“Of course, I am biased toward the icy dwarf, Pluto,” said Binzel who is an expert on asteroids and ground-and space-based observational techniques.</p>
<p>He is also a co-investigator on NASA’s New Horizons mission that launched a spacecraft in 2006, and journeyed for nine years to reach Pluto and the Kuiper asteroid belt. On Jan. 1, 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Ultima Thule&nbsp;— an object roughly 25 miles across and whose name fittingly means “beyond the known world,” as it is 1.6 billion kilometers beyond Pluto.</p>
<p>“If we made another plaque for Ultima Thule, I suppose it would be hanging just outside the window in Eastman court,” said Binzel.</p>
<p>Under the auspices of the School of Science, Binzel enlisted the help of Todd Robinson, a campus planner with the MIT Office of Campus Planning, and Arthur Lue, a technical staff member in the Space Systems and Technologies Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, to turn this assignment into reality.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“This was an opportunity to work directly with some of the brightest minds in the field. I jumped at the chance,” said Robinson who oversees planning projects related to signage.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Lue executed the 3-D models that adorn the signage for each planetary and astronomical object along the Infinite Solar System installation.</p>
<p>“I've wanted to become involved because making scale models of the solar system has been a bit of a lifelong obsession,” said Lue, who has a 3-D printed moon collection.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Although astronomy is a passionate pastime for Lue, it is also his life’s work. At Lincoln Laboratory, Lue models astrodynamics, or the orbital physics of objects in space, such as active satellites to predict how they can avoid the ever-increasing amount of space junk, asteroids, and other debris surrounding the Earth.</p>
<p>He’s also an expert when it comes to 3-D design and printing. Designing the full set of objects took several weeks. Then Lue sent out the files to be created by an on-demand 3-D printing company — a process that took roughly eight days to manufacture each 4.3-cm-diameter model.</p>
<p>“See if you can spot the hack on Earth,” said Binzel mysteriously,&nbsp;as he led a tour down the Infinite in advance of the phenomenon known as MIThenge.</p>
<p>The projects’ creators chose to unveil the installation on Nov. 9 to coincide with the Infinite Corridor’s alignment with the setting sun, which illuminates the 200 meters of hallway for several minutes, much in the same way that Stonehenge appears at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. However, the clouds obscured the view for event participants that evening. “Now you know the pain of an astronomer,” Binzel joked.</p>
<p>The Infinite Solar System will remain on the third floor for the next two years, but Binzel said he’s hopeful that the installation will generate enough interest to earn its place among the campus’ most beloved-art.</p>
<p>At this scale, the speed of light could be represented by a snail’s pace of 1 centimeter per second, said Binzel. Therefore, walking at a normal clip across the Infinite Solar System would mean traveling faster than light.</p>
<p>“I am going to love saying, ‘If you’re late for class, walk the third floor of the Infinite and get there faster than light speed,’” he said.</p>
A plaque describing the sun (far left) begins the Infinite Solar System installation on the third floor of the Infinite Corridor near Lobby 7.Photo: William T.G. LitantEAPS, Solar System, Space, astronomy and planetary science, Faculty, Arts, School of Science, STEM educationTimes Higher Education ranks MIT No.1 in business and economics, No.2 in arts and humanitieshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/times-higher-education-ranks-mit-1-business-economics-2-arts-humanities-1115
Worldwide honors for 2019 span three MIT schools.Thu, 15 Nov 2018 13:25:01 -0500School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/times-higher-education-ranks-mit-1-business-economics-2-arts-humanities-1115<p>MIT has taken the top spot in the Business and Economics subject category in the 2019 Times Higher Education World University Rankings and, for the second year in a row, the No. 2 spot worldwide for Arts and Humanities.<br />
<br />
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings is an annual publication of university rankings by&nbsp;<em>Times Higher Education,</em> a leading British education magazine. The rankings use a set of 13 rigorous performance indicators to evaluate schools both overall and within individual fields. Criteria include teaching and learning environment, research volume and influence, and international outlook.</p>
<p><strong>Business and Economics</strong></p>
<p>The No. 1 ranking for Business and Economics is based on an evaluation of both the MIT Department of Economics — housed in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences — and of the MIT Sloan School of Management.</p>
<p>“We are always delighted when the high quality of work going on in our school and across MIT is recognized, and warmly congratulate our colleagues in MIT Sloan with whom we share this honor,” said Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS).</p>
<p>The Business and Economics ranking evaluated 585 universities for their excellence in business, management, accounting, finance, economics, and econometrics subjects. In this category, MIT was followed by Stanford University and Oxford University.</p>
<p>“Being recognized as first in business and management is gratifying and we are thrilled to share the honors with our colleagues in the MIT Department of Economics and MIT SHASS,” said David Schmittlein, dean of MIT Sloan.</p>
<p>MIT has long been a powerhouse in economics. For over a century, the Department of Economics at MIT has played a leading role in economics education, research, and public service and the department’s faculty have won a total of nine Nobel Prizes over the years. MIT Sloan faculty have also won two Nobels, and the school is known as a driving force behind MIT’s entrepreneurial ecosystem: Companies started by MIT alumni have created millions of jobs and generate nearly $2 trillion a year in revenue.</p>
<p><strong>Arts and Humanities</strong></p>
<p>The Arts and Humanities ranking evaluated 506 universities that lead in art, performing arts, design, languages, literature, linguistics, history, philosophy, theology, architecture, and archaeology subjects. MIT was rated just below Stanford and above Harvard University in this category. MIT’s high ranking reflects the strength of both the humanities disciplines and performing arts located in MIT SHASS and the design fields and humanistic work located in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P).</p>
<p>At MIT, outstanding humanities and arts programs in SHASS — including literature; history; music and theater arts; linguistics; philosophy; comparative media studies; writing; languages; science, technology and society; and women’s and gender studies — sit alongside equally strong initiatives within SA+P in the arts; architecture; design; urbanism; and history, theory, and criticism. SA+P is also home to the Media Lab, which focuses on unconventional research in technology, media, science, art, and design.</p>
<p>“The recognition from <em>Times Higher Education</em> confirms the importance of creativity and human values in the advancement of science and technology,” said Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P. “It also rewards MIT’s longstanding commitment to “The Arts” — words that are carved in the Lobby 7 dome signifying one of the main areas for the application of technology.”</p>
<p>Receiving awards in multiple categories and in categories that span multiple schools at MIT is a recognition of the success MIT has had in fostering cross-disciplinary thinking, said Dean Nobles.</p>
<p>“It’s a testament to the strength of MIT’s model that these areas of scholarship and pedagogy are deeply seeded in multiple administrative areas,” Nobles said. “At MIT, we know that solving challenging problems requires the combined insight and knowledge from many fields. The world’s complex issues are not only scientific and technological problems; they are as much human and ethical problems.”</p>
“At MIT, we know that solving challenging problems requires the combined knowledge and insight from many fields. The world’s complex issues are not only scientific and technological problems; they are as much human and ethical problems,” says Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.Photo: Madcoverboy/Wikimedia CommonsAwards, honors and fellowships, Arts, Architecture, Business and management, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Economics, Global Studies and Languages, Humanities, History, Literature, Linguistics, Management, Music, Philosophy, Theater, Urban studies and planning, Rankings, Media Lab, School of Architecture and Planning, Sloan School of Management, School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences“Schoenberg in Hollywood,” the operahttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-schoenberg-hollywood-new-opera-examines-ideas-heritage-politics-and-artistic-integrity-1114
New work by Tod Machover of the Media Lab&#039;s Opera of the Future group examines ideas of heritage, politics, and artistic integrity.Wed, 14 Nov 2018 16:50:00 -0500Janine Liberty | MIT Media Labhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-schoenberg-hollywood-new-opera-examines-ideas-heritage-politics-and-artistic-integrity-1114<p>Today the Boston Lyric Opera presents the world premiere of “<a href="http://schoenberg.media.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Schoenberg in Hollywood</a>,” a new opera by Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and director of the MIT Media Lab's Opera of the Future group. Performances will run through Nov.&nbsp;18.</p>
<p>“Schoenberg in Hollywood” is inspired by the life of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg after he fled Hitler’s Europe in the 1930s. After moving first to Boston and then to Los Angeles, Schoenberg sought connection with his new culture through music. He forged a friendship with famous comedian Harpo Marx, who introduced him to MGM’s Irving Thalberg, who in turn offered him the opportunity to compose a score for the film “The Good Earth.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>Schoenberg ultimately turned down the commission, rejecting the lure of more money and greater fame in favor of his artistic integrity (and after proposing highly unrealistic artistic and financial terms). In doing so, Schoenberg chose a path of fidelity to his heritage and his musical identity — a decision that pitted change against tradition, art against entertainment, and personal struggle against public action.</p>
<p>Machover’s opera is bookended by the Thalberg meeting, after which the fictional Schoenberg goes off to make a film about his own life. This imagined creation follows the narrative of Schoenberg’s historical journey up to a point, then diverges in a wild fantasy to imagine a different path had Schoenberg been able to reconcile opposing forces. Drawing on inspirations ranging from Jewish liturgical music to Bach and a World War I soundscape to contemporary 20th century music, Machover illustrates Schoenberg’s personal evolution through a synthesis of shifting influences.</p>
<p>“I immersed myself in Schoenberg’s world through his extensive — and incredible — writings, his music, his paintings, through visiting his amazing archives in Vienna, and by speaking with many people who knew him,” Machover explains. “But I grew up with Schoenberg’s music, so have been thinking about this for a very long time. It is part of me.”</p>
<p>Machover also drew on his own experience as a composer in a rapidly changing world to inform his interpretation of Schoenberg’s musical and personal journey.</p>
<p>“The work explores one man's journey to move millions to social and political action while remaining deeply thoughtful and thoroughly ethical,” Machover says. “The underlying artistic, activist, and ethical questions raised in this opera are ones that we ask every day at the Media Lab.”</p>
<p>The opera is also uniquely informed by Machover’s dual roles as artist and technologist. The opera blends reality and fantasy, combining live singers and actors with diverse media, and acoustic sound, with complex electronics spread throughout the theater, while incorporating physical stage effects that modify perspective and perception in unusual ways.</p>
<p>“The Media Lab is the only environment I know where the forms and technologies of this opera could have been imagined and developed,” Machover says.</p>
<p>A polymath and inventor, Schoenberg never earned a degree from any academic or musical institution, but became the top composition professor at the renowned Berlin Conservatory of Music (before being expelled immediately upon Hitler’s rise to power). His depth of knowledge informed but never limited his own musical explorations. His invention of 12-tone technique, which Schoenberg described as “a method of composing with 12 tones which are related only with one another," changed the face of Western music in the 20th century and beyond.</p>
<p>“He invented not only music but all kinds of unusual things, like a new notation system for tennis games (designed to annotate his son’s expert playing), contraptions to draw his own customized music manuscript paper, a curriculum to train movie composers in a purely sonic art, a painting technique to allow him to depict his inner mental state rather than outside physical features in a series of self-portraits,” says Machover. “As an intellect and creator, Schoenberg would have fit right into the Media Lab.”</p>
<p>In celebration not only of the opera’s premiere but also of the Media Lab’s informal adoption of Schoenberg, the lab is now hosting an <a href="http://www.media.mit.edu/events/schoenberg-in-hollywood/" target="_blank">exhibition</a> on “Schoenberg in Hollywood” in the lobby gallery of Building E14. Videos and archival materials trace Schoenberg’s journey, including materials on loan from the Schoenberg Center in Vienna, most of which have never before been shown in the Boston area. The exhibition also serves as a companion to the opera, offering a listening station, a video trailer of one of the opera’s climactic moments, some of Machover’s own musical sketches, and an illustrated timeline juxtaposing events in Schoenberg’s life with scenes and sounds from Machover’s opera.</p>
<p>“The exhibition is a resonant companion to the opera, useful whether experienced before or after a performance,” explains Machover. “But is also meant to stand alone to introduce the art and life of this remarkable creator to the MIT community and beyond, and to tell at least a bit of the story about why this unusual new opera grew out of inspiration from Arnold Schoenberg ... and the MIT Media Lab itself.”</p>
<p>“Schoenberg in Hollywood”<em> </em>runs Nov.&nbsp;14-18 at the Emerson Paramount Theater in Boston. The Media Lab’s exhibition is currently open to the public and will run through April 30.</p>
Singer Omar Ebrahim as Arnold Schoenberg as Humphrey Bogart, from "Schoenberg in Hollywood"Photo: Peter TorpeyMusic, School of Architecture and Planning, Media Lab, History, Theater, Arts, Technology and societyEkene Ijeoma joins MIT Media Labhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/artist-ekene-ijeoma-joins-mit-media-lab-1107
The new media arts and sciences faculty member merges social justice with design, architecture, music, performance, and technology.Wed, 07 Nov 2018 10:10:00 -0500Stacie Slotnick | MIT Media Labhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/artist-ekene-ijeoma-joins-mit-media-lab-1107<p>Artist Ekene Ijeoma will join the MIT Media Lab, founding and directing the Poetic Justice research group, in January 2019. Ijeoma, who will be an assistant professor, works at the intersections of design, architecture, music, performance, and technology, creating multisensory artworks from personal experiences, social issues, and data studies.</p>
<p>Ijeoma's work explores topics and issues ranging from refugee migration to mass incarceration. At its most basic level, the work aspires to embody&nbsp;human conditions, expand people's thoughts, and engage them in imagining change and acting on it. At the lab, Ijeoma will continue this work in developing new forms of justice through artistic representation and intervention.</p>
<p>“New forms of justice can emerge through art that engages with social, cultural and political issues — ones that aren’t tied to codified laws and biased systems,” he&nbsp;says.</p>
<p>When asked to define “poetic justice,” Ijeoma explained that, for him, the phrase is about using code-switching content, form, context, and function to create artwork with rhythm and harmony that extends our perceptions and exposes the social-political systems affecting us as individuals. An example of this is his “Deconstructed Anthems” project, an ongoing series of music performances and light installations that explores the inequalities of the American Dream and realities of mass incarceration through “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “​Pan-African AIDS,” a sculpture examining the hypervisibility of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and the hidden one in Black America.&nbsp;“​Pan-African AIDS,” is on display through April&nbsp;2019 at the Museum of the City of New York as part of the exhibit <a href="http://www.media.mit.edu/events/germ-city-microbes-and-the-metropolis/" target="_blank">Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis</a>.</p>
<p>Ijeoma’s art practice has been primarily project-based and commission-driven. His recent large works, both deeply conceptual yet highly technical projects, required research and development to happen concurrently with the production of the work. At the Media Lab, with more space for trial and error and failure, he will have the resources and facilities to stay reflective and proactive, to create work outside of commissions, and to expand more artworks into series. In addition, he will have opportunities for more listening to and meditating on issues.</p>
<p>“Like many artists,” said Ijeoma, “A lot of my work comes from vibing and forward thinking —&nbsp;channeling my environment and signaling out the noise.” This aspect of his practice is reflected in work such as “The Refugee Project ” (2014), released a few months before the European refugee crisis, and “Look Up” (2016), released a few days before Pokemon Go; and more recently “Pan-African AIDS” which was presented as news was breaking on the underreported AIDS epidemic in the black populations in areas including the American South.</p>
<p>Ijeoma’s work has been commissioned and presented by venues and events including the Museum of Modern Art, The Kennedy Center, the Design Museum, the Istanbul Design Biennial, Fondation EDF, the Annenberg Space for Photography, the Neuberger Museum of Art at the State University of New York at Purchase, and Storefront for Art and Architecture.</p>
<p>“We are thrilled that Ekene Ijeoma will be joining the Media Lab and MAS program,” said Tod Machover, head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, the Media Lab’s academic program. “Ekene’s work is brilliant, bold, and beautiful, and the way he combines expression, reflection, innovation, and activism will place him at the absolute center of Media Lab culture, hopefully for many years to come.”</p>
<p>Ekene Ijeoma graduated with a BS in information technology from Rochester Institute of Technology, and an MA in interaction design from Domus Academy. He has lectured and critiqued at Yale University, Harvard Law School, Columbia University, New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and The New School.</p>
Artist Ekene Ijeoma sits with “​Pan-African AIDS,” a sculpture representing the hyper-visibility of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and the hidden one in Black America.Photo: Kris Graves, courtesy of Ekene IjeomaSchool of Architecture and Planning, Media Lab, Arts, Faculty, Design, Architecture, Policy, Social justice, Music, Technology and societyA ground-breaking mash-uphttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-hubweek-kendall-square-1023
A new building at 314 Main Street for the MIT Museum, Boeing, and others brings Cambridge and MIT together for memorable HUBweek celebration.Tue, 23 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-hubweek-kendall-square-1023<p>HUBweek in Kendall Square — it’s become a pretty good bet. And the festivities on Oct. 9 didn’t disappoint.</p>
<p>Now in its fourth year, HUBweek is a “festival of the future” that celebrates science, art, and technology. MIT is a founding sponsor, along with Harvard University,&nbsp;<em>The Boston Globe,&nbsp;</em>and Massachusetts General Hospital. This year’s theme was “We the Future.” The Kendall Square/MIT Innovation Playground and 314 Main Street Ground-breaking showcased the Institute’s innovative spirit right in the historic heart and future hub of MIT and Kendall Square.</p>
<p>The day began with a sold-out MIT Club of Boston event called “Inside the Dome: MIT and the Future of Kendall Square.” Israel Ruiz, MIT’s executive vice president and treasurer, joined with Katie Rae, CEO and managing partner of The Engine; Steve Marsh, managing director of real estate; Elisabeth Reynolds, executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center; Muriel Médard, the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and over 200 attendees to discuss MIT’s role in the transformation of Kendall Square and their collective vision for its future.</p>
<p><strong>Innovation Playground</strong></p>
<p>The tone for the rest of the day was set by the energetic buzz at the eight-hour-long “Innovation Playground.” The event was one of MIT’s HUBweek “Open Doors” offerings and took place inside the Institute’s graduate student housing construction site in the middle of Kendall Square.</p>
<p>The raw space, which will one day house a public food hall, was a perfect backdrop for a lineup of activities including digital portals to people around the world, a life-size coloring book, a learn-how-to-DJ station, a make-your-own unity print station, digital graffiti, augmented and virtual reality, a bank of old-fashioned phones sharing snippets of history, a Boeing autonomous vehicle exhibit, a GIF booth, a collection station for a time capsule, an open space brainstorming station, and an MIT-designed interactive art piece, “Flow,” created by MIT alumnus Karl Sims.</p>
<p>About 650 people came through the Innovation Playground during the course of the afternoon to play, explore, and socialize. Attendees say the experience felt part nightclub, part museum, and part coffee shop. Some stayed for hours.</p>
<p><strong>Ground-breaking</strong></p>
<p>In the evening, over 200 people joined together for an unconventional ground-breaking ceremony for the Institute’s 314 Main Street building, which is a key component of MIT’s Kendall Square Initiative. The building will be the future home of the new MIT Museum, the Boeing Aerospace and Autonomy Center, and other innovative tenants. Attendees watched the speaking program while others continued to play games, and about 60 neighborhood children and youth from the nearby Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, East End House, Innovators4Purpose, and Community Art Center participated enthusiastically in the proceedings. When asked why MIT likes the 314 Main Street address, one child told the crowd that she knew that it was the number representing Pi or π.</p>
<p>“I haven’t been to all that many ground-breakings,” said MIT Museum Director John Durant, “but this event is a mash-up, and I’m so happy about that. It reflects the spirit and philosophy of the museum.”</p>
<p>MIT Provost Martin Schmidt described the surrounding context for the 314 Main Street building. It will be located next to a redesigned MBTA head house in the new MIT/Kendall gateway area, and across from the Institute’s new graduate student residence hall, now under construction. A “new front door” will lead to an inviting open space area that will be programmed to showcase the innovative spirit of MIT. “When it’s all done, no one will ever come up from the MBTA again and ask “Where is MIT?’”</p>
<p>Schmidt also summarized MIT’s long-term relationship with Boeing: “The MIT/Boeing relationship is over a century old — we have been problem-solving and advancing technologies together for a long time. In this new chapter of our relationship, Boeing will be focused on autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence-enabled air travel. We are thrilled that they have decided to join us here in Kendall.”</p>
<p>Boeing Chief Technology Officer Greg Hyslop said: “We at Boeing are again embracing our inner startup. We’ve started an organization called NeXt, and we’re pushing forward with a new breed of autonomous vehicles and new concepts in AI-enabled airspace. We see fundamental changes coming in how people and goods move from place to place.”</p>
<p>Aurora Flight Sciences, which is part of the Boeing Company, will be moving its Kendall-based research and development center into the new building. John Langford, Aurora Flight Sciences founder, chief executive officer, and&nbsp;MIT&nbsp;alumnus said: “Today, Aurora’s&nbsp;Kendall Square&nbsp;team is already building innovative autonomous systems. By expanding Aurora’s 30-year relationship with&nbsp;MIT, and working with Boeing, we are creating a collaborative space where engineers, students and researchers can work together to create technologies that will define the next-century of air mobility.”</p>
<p><strong>Museum membership free for Cambridge residents</strong></p>
<p>At the start of the ground-breaking program, Sarah Gallop, MIT’s co-director of government and community relations, invited Cambridge Mayor Marc McGovern to join her and Durant on stage.</p>
<p>Durant announced that membership to the MIT Museum will be free to all Cambridge residents once it opens its doors in 2021. “Fantastic!” said the mayor. “That is very good and welcome news for our whole community. Thank you, MIT!”</p>
<p><strong>Main Street’s “Walls of Unity” mural</strong></p>
<p>The Community Art Center (CAC), located in the Cambridge neighborhood known as “The Port,” runs youth programs that create community-sourced public art installations. MIT has worked with CAC youth in the Teen Media Program on several murals that have been displayed at MIT construction sites over the past few years. The most recent creation is a 360-foot “Walls of Unity” mural that stretches along Main Street in front of the graduate student housing construction site and 314 Main Street. The mural, part of the CAC’s “Creative Current” initiative, depicts images of unity that have been created by young artists in the organization’s apprenticeship program and members of the MIT and Cambridge communities.</p>
<p>CAC Executive Director Eryn Johnson shared her perspective on the unique endeavor. “We are grateful to MIT for generously partnering with us. It’s extremely meaningful for our young artists to have their creations featured so prominently in Kendall Square.” William Gallop, one of the CAC apprentices, said: “I never thought I’d see my work displayed in public like that. It makes me feel empowered to be able to put my artistic voice towards good purposes.”</p>
<p>Mayor McGovern said “William, thank you — keep on doing what you’re doing! And Eryn Johnson, you are a stalwart leader and role model in our community.”</p>
<p><strong>314 Main Street</strong></p>
<p>Architects Weiss/Manfredi and Perkins+Will designed the new 437,000 square foot commercial lab building at 314 Main Street, and Turner Construction Company is constructing the facility. Expected to be completed in 2020, the 250-foot high building will house the MIT Press Bookstore, a restaurant, and a café, in addition to the MIT Museum and Boeing. Other forward-looking companies are expected to sign on as tenants in the coming months.</p>
<p>Höweler +&nbsp;Yoon&nbsp;Architecture designed the interior museum space, which will be located on the first, second, and third floors and will include exhibition and public programs space, classrooms, a store, and space for administration and collections research.</p>
Ceremonial groundbreaking, left to right: Community Art Center Apprentice William Gallop, Community Art Center Executive Director Eryn Johnson, Aurora Flight Sciences CEO John Langford, Boeing CTO Greg Hyslop, MIT Provost Martin Schmidt, Cambridge Vice Mayor Jan Devereux, MIT Museum Director John Durant, and MIT Co-Director of Government and Community Relations Sarah GallopImage: Allan DinesBoston and region, Community, Arts, Campus buildings and architecture, Facilities, Innovation and Entrpreneurship (I&E), MIT Museum, Special events and guest speakersUnraveling the complex histories of Palestinian artwork https://news.mit.edu/2018/nisa-ari-palestinian-artwork-1023
“My job is to be critical and deep as an art historian, and not as a politician,” says PhD student Nisa Ari.Mon, 22 Oct 2018 23:59:59 -0400Fatima Husain | MIT News correspondenthttps://news.mit.edu/2018/nisa-ari-palestinian-artwork-1023<p>Before she was a PhD student searching through art history archives around the world, a young Nisa Ari attended museums with her family and tried to discern the histories behind the artwork and artifacts she saw. “It always had the appeal of detective work,” Ari says. Sometimes, when she’d walk into a new gallery, she’d challenge herself to identify artists from paintings at a distance: “That’s a Cézanne, that’s a Picasso, that’s a Léger.”</p>
<p>When visiting her father’s family in Istanbul, the Colorado native would sit and sketch on the porch with her grandfather, an artist. Ari’s interests included the performing arts as well. “I was a singer,” Ari says. “That was my life, but I was really academically minded, too. So when it came time to go to college, I applied to music conservatories as well as [universities].” Ari decided to attend Stanford University — with the intention to move to New York City and live as a performer after completing her undergraduate degree.</p>
<p>She enrolled in an art history class at Stanford during her first year — a decision which led her to major in art history. Following graduation, Ari spent five years auditioning for roles and performing in musical theater productions around the country. But she had a longing to return to the art world, and worked as an assistant director at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City. “That experience was good — it made me realize that I was not willing to totally commit myself to a life of performing,” Ari says. “There was a moment when I thought, it’s time to do a PhD.”</p>
<p>Now, Ari is a doctoral candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT, and studies the development of arts and crafts in Palestine from 1876 to 1948. Her transition back into academia was “relatively painless,” she says — and she still takes cues from her training as a performer to work though her dissertation. “I like to say I tap dance through grad school — I feel like I use the skills [gained in New York] all the time in what I do now.”</p>
<p><strong>Seeking insight </strong></p>
<p>Ari was drawn to the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program because of its strength in modern Middle Eastern art history. Her early research was rooted in the 1990s — a period when prominent nonprofits that supported the arts arrived in the Middle East. With guidance from co-advisors Nasser Rabbat, the director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, and Caroline Jones, a professor of art history, Ari zeroed in on the idea of studying the development of Palestinian art during the 19th and 20th centuries. But it was a challenge: Three other students interested in Palestine had been stymied by a lack of access to artwork, the lack of a record of Palestinian artwork in archives, and the difficulties of working across the politics of the region. But Ari, who studied Arabic at Harvard University while enrolled at MIT and took summer research trips to Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Jordan through MISTI, was determined to follow through.</p>
<p>Ari’s fieldwork is “more comparable to that of an anthropologist or sociologist” and involves travel to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, England, and Jordan. She looks through a plethora of documents that record the development of art by artists and social commentators alike: files, letters, photographs, postcards. Not all records are public — Ari often works to track down private collections as well. “There are several private Palestinian [art] collectors who live in Beirut, Lebanon. Those collections are more personal,” Ari says. While most of the artists Ari studies are now deceased, she sometimes comes across their descendants and listens to their stories.</p>
<p>“I’m very interested in social relationships and social networks in terms of how they affect artistic production,” Ari says. “For me, the proof is always in the pudding. I always have to be able to still see it in the artwork to understand those relationships.”</p>
<p>Between the end of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century and the close of the British Mandate in 1948, Palestine underwent widespread political and social changes. Ari focuses on notable shifts in the region’s artwork and how art was used, from religious purposes to commercial and political ones. “I’m trying to understand how changes in art happened in Palestine as a result of this major political and social upheaval,” she says.</p>
<p><strong>Informing research methods</strong></p>
<p>Ari is also well aware of the political and social tensions stemming from the Arab-Israeli conflict in the countries she visits to perform her research. “It’s tough because it’s such an active situation, and people’s lives really are at stake,” Ari says. “There’s a kind of emotional labor involved in that there’s a lot of code switching that I have to do when I’m talking to an Israeli at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem versus when I’m meeting with a Palestinian art collector in Bethlehem. While my project stays the same, my approach has to change.”</p>
<p>In some cases, Ari has to meet with curators and archivists multiple times before gaining access to archives: “Understandably, for some there’s a real fear about how you’re going to use the material.”</p>
<p>“I’ve found that honesty is the best policy and just to present myself as best I can, because the whole purpose of the project is to preserve nuance where so much of it has been lost because of contemporary politics,” Ari says. “I think it really helps that I did not start from a place of politics for this particular project.”</p>
<p>Ari cites her own heritage — her father’s family is orthodox Muslim and her mother’s is orthodox Jewish. “Having some background in both of these religious cultures has helped me to recognize the nuances of the situation. … My job is to be critical and deep as an art historian and not as a politician.”</p>
<p>“I remind myself that I’m making a choice to do this every day when I’m crossing the border [between Israel and the Palestinian territories] — other people who are there with me don’t have that choice,” Ari says.</p>
<p>Ari has also been co-editor of <em>Thresholds</em>, the MIT architecture department’s peer-reviewed journal; a dissertation fellow with the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies; a research fellow with the Palestinian American Research Center; a dissertation fellow at Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan; and the recipient of an international research grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. She also received the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Art for a section from her dissertation, which was recently published in <em>Arab Studies Journal</em>.</p>
<p>After MIT, Ari hopes to apply for postdoctoral fellowships and teaching positions and turn her dissertation into a book, with the long-term intention of teaching. “I intended to teach from the start,” she says.</p>
Nisa Ari is a doctoral candidate in MIT's History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program.Courtesy of Nisa AriHistory, Humanities, Middle East, MISTI, Profile, Students, School of Architecture and Planning, Graduate, postdoctoral, Arts, ArchitectureAddressing Africa&#039;s sustainable development https://news.mit.edu/2018/addressing-sustainable-development-in-africa-1019
Researchers and experts attend African Sustainable Development Conference at MIT.Fri, 19 Oct 2018 14:20:01 -0400Taylor De Leon | Civil and Environmental Engineeringhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/addressing-sustainable-development-in-africa-1019<p>Climate change, a surging population, and increasing demand for food, housing and natural resources present Africa and the world with extraordinary challenges.</p>
<p>On Sept. 24, numerous experts from diverse disciplines and areas of the world convened at MIT to discuss sustainable development in Africa. The conference was hosted by the Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique-MIT Research Program (UMRP), a collaboration with the Moroccan university (UM6P) led by MIT faculty director Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, the Breene M. Kerr Professor of Hydrology and Climate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.</p>
<p>UMRP, which launched in 2016, is comprised of six projects led by MIT faculty, which are each built around the dissertation research of an MIT graduate student. The UMRP researchers work closely with the faculty and student colleagues from UM6P, who engage in complementary research.</p>
<p>The African Sustainability Conference provided a showcase for these projects, featuring presentations from MIT and UM6P faculty, researchers, and international experts on climate and water, sustainable urbanization, precision agriculture, smart chemistry, and industrial optimization for the phosphate industry. Group discussions related to critical challenges and potential opportunities within each area followed each session.</p>
<p>Eltahir began the conference by highlighting the significance of Africa in terms of global sustainability, noting that the substantial yet uncertain effects of climate change are already noticeable in agricultural productivity and infrastructure throughout the continent. Projections show that by 2050, Africa’s population will double from 1 billion to 2 billion people, creating an influx of urbanization.</p>
<p>“We are forging an honest collaboration between MIT and a like-minded research and education partner in Africa with the mission of advancing sustainability goals, while also helping build UM6P’s institutional capacity to lead by example on the continent,” expressed Eltahir.</p>
<p>Eltahir brings his background in hydrology and climate to his own UMRP research project, that focuses on improving water management and agricultural productivity in one of Morocco’s major river basins, the Oum-Er-Rbia watershed.</p>
<p>“Climate change is a major challenge for the world, especially concerning Africa. Morocco is a country that suffers from interannual rainfall variability. We are focused on looking for ways to improve management for water resources and availability,” explained Eltahir.</p>
<p>Morocco is highly vulnerable to heat waves and low precipitation, and those extremes are expected to intensify due to climate change. Eltahir’s research addresses these issues through a three-level modeling approach geared toward climatology and forecasting, hydrology, and operations in terms of agricultural planning and infrastructure.</p>
<p>He hopes the program will continue to grow, allowing for further collaboration between MIT and UM6P, students, and faculty. Furthermore, some of the tools, models, and processes that are being utilized in Morocco and greater Africa, can be applied to other regions around the world who will face similar challenges due to climate change.</p>
<p>In addition to Eltahir, the workshop brought together MIT professors John Fernández of the Department of Architecture, Benedetto Marelli of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Paul Barton of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Christopher Cummins and Yogesh Surendranath of the Department of Chemistry. Including UM6P colleagues, invited international experts, and MIT graduate students, the conference highlighted efforts to implement resilience, adaptability, and sustainability into the future of African cities.</p>
<p>John Fernández, director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative and professor of architecture, helped launch UMRP with the focus that there is an urgency needed for long-term sustainability, in the areas of society, economy, and climate.</p>
<p>Through comprehensive material accounting of the needs of Moroccan cities, Fernández will be developing specific technology and policy recommendations for UM6P, providing the country with a template for long term urban sustainability.</p>
<p>“One of our goals is to produce a UMRP urban resource tool that would allow Morocco and greater Africa to access data and reach informed decisions about urban sustainability,” said Fernández. The tool’s engine would be developed in partnership with UM6P and the tool itself would be offered online.</p>
<p>The strains of urban population growth, and a predicted threefold increase in urban energy and urban land area globally is a primary motivation of the project. In addition, it is likely that low-income urban areas in Africa will be most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change due to unreliable and limited access to energy sources, water, and shelter.</p>
<p>“With climate change, what happens in terms of the vulnerability of lower income segments of urban population, and at what point, with extreme heat, intense precipitation or climate-induced water shortage does urban vulnerability become urban survivability?” Fernández asked.</p>
<p><strong>Securing resources for the future</strong></p>
<p>In addition to climate concerns, agricultural production concerns were raised as well from both MIT and UM6P experts.</p>
<p>Benedetto Marelli, the Paul M Cook Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, shared that he is focused on developing new technologies that can increase agricultural production. He stated that with a growing population, a 70 percent increase in food production will be necessary by 2050.</p>
<p>Marelli is in the process of creating biofertilizers that can work with the plant, to boost germination and overcome environmental stressors such as pests, disease, heat waves, and drought.</p>
<p>Manal Mhada, a postdoc from UM6P, presented her research on precision agriculture, and the efficient use of seeds and fertilizers. Her work focuses on human-centered solutions for Moroccan communities, and includes local farmers in her research projects.</p>
<p>Mhada conducts close studies of the crop quinoa, with the intention of introducing it to Morocco in order to provide food and nutritional security. She acknowledges that climate change threatens agriculture, food security, and peace, but emphasizes that “big problems allow for immense opportunity.”</p>
<p>Resilience became a common thread throughout the conference. Hassan Radoine, director of the School of Architecture and Design at UM6P, urges for a paradigm shift, explaining how most people perceive Africa as poor.</p>
<p>“What is resilience? The responsiveness to risk and inventing new solutions. The reconstructing of a community or a place, is resilience,” Radoine said.</p>
<p>Echoing this, Remy Sietchiping, UN-Habitat leader of regional and metropolitan planning, outlined the urban agenda of creating smart cities that encompass adaptability and most importantly, resilience.</p>
<p>“You cannot buy sustainability,” Randoine said.</p>
<p>During the last session of the conference, gears shifted towards the “smart chemistry” projects, which work closely with Moroccan company, OCP, the leading supplier of phosphate rock in the world. Paul M Cook Career Development Assistant Professor Yogeth Surendranath of the MIT Department of Chemistry presented on the natural resource, phosphorous, which is abundant to Morocco.</p>
<p>However, the process of creating phosphate products demands an incredible amount of energy. Surendranath’s research is targeted at elucidating the process of electrochemical phosphate reduction in molten salts, in order to lower economic and environmental costs, and advance Morocco in the chemical markets.</p>
<p>Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry Christopher Cummins’ project is also working with phosphate, and has successfully created a new method for the synthesis of phosphorous. The method utilizes a “wet process,” which enables the reduction of energy inputs, waste, and overall harm to the environment.</p>
<p>Following Cummins, Professor Paul Barton of the Department of Chemistry, discussed his project on optimal industrial symbiosis for the Jorf Lasfar platform, the phosphate mineral processing facility in Morocco. Barton is studying ways to optimize the phosphate resource, to generate returns on investment while also being mindful of energy and water consumption.</p>
<p>Throughout the afternoon, goals for the future were at the forefront of everyone’s mind. UMRP aims to continue to conduct impactful research, tackle developmental challenges, and build a strong foundation for UM6P.</p>
<p>“This conference provided a wonderful platform for UMRP to showcase their projects, build a community with UM6P and other colleagues, and help the growing institutional commitment of MIT to engage fruitfully in a future of sustainable development for Africa,” said UMRP Executive Director Kurt Sternlof.</p>
<p>It was evident that the MIT faculty-led research is results-driven and exhibits a strong vision of a sustainable future. The idea that UMRP research projects develop small solutions to make big impacts, became a recurring element of the conference.</p>
<p>“Whether discussing urban metabolism, industrial symbiosis, chemical processing or the hydrological cycle, the common theme of recognizing and optimizing closed loops of resource use — circular economies of production, consumption and renewal — was clear and compelling, and therein beats the heart of sustainability,” Sternlof said.</p>
Hassan Radoine, director of the School of Architecture and Design at UM6P, presents at MIT on African urbanization.Photo: Taylor De LeonSpecial events and guest speakers, Sustainability, Agriculture, Africa, Climate change, Civil and environmental engineering, Chemistry, Architecture, Chemical engineering, School of Science, School of Engineering, School of Architecture and Planning, DevelopmentA passionate advocate for open datahttps://news.mit.edu/2018/Radha-Mastandrea-student-1018
Senior Radha Mastandrea analyzes data from CERN in search of more information about the universe’s fundamental particles.Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400Gina Vitale | MIT News correspondenthttps://news.mit.edu/2018/Radha-Mastandrea-student-1018<p>Radha Mastandrea wants to know what the universe is made of.</p>
<p>More specifically, she wants to know about tiny pieces of it called quarks, the particles that make up other, bigger particles such as protons and neutrons. The more we know about those, she says, the more we know about the building blocks of all matter.</p>
<p>Mastandrea’s research is largely dependent on data, which she gets from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will smash two protons together, which will generate a number of quarks and gluons. Every such particle then “showers” into a stream of other particles — these streams are called quark jets, or gluon jets (depending on the particle they showered from). Mastandrea then sifts through heaps of raw data about these jets, and uses the information to learn more about the particles they came from.</p>
<p>Professor Allan Adams, a former recitation instructor of Mastandrea’s, suggested she describe her current work “as if we were slamming two clocks together and we get two elephants out.” The clocks are protons — when they’re slammed together, the quark jets that result aren’t necessarily what researchers would have predicted.</p>
<p>“The step I add,” Mastandrea says, “is, you slam together clocks, you get two elephants, and then the elephants create baby elephants, and you record the baby elephants,” she laughs. “At some point the analogy kind of breaks down.”</p>
<p><strong>Data-driven</strong></p>
<p>Part of what makes Mastandrea’s research challenging is that data from CERN are organized in a way that works well for researchers there, but are difficult to sort through for scientists outside of CERN who may not understand how the data are structured.</p>
<p>To be sure, Mastandrea applauds CERN for making its data open to everyone; she’s passionate about the ability of open data to further research around the globe. However, she and her labmates have developed a GitHub tool that extracts important information from CERN’s data and puts it in a text file that’s easier for labs outside CERN to interpret. They plan to make that framework public. She used <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2018/paying-it-forward-fellowship-boosts-women-physics-0802">a grant she received from the Heising-Simons</a> Foundation to expand computing resources for this project. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Before using CERN’s data, Mastandrea primarily worked with simulations. During her first year at MIT she began studying emissions at the 21-centimeter line, which is named after the wavelength of energy hydrogen atoms emit when after they undergo a certain energy change. That summer, she studied neutrinoless double beta decays under Lindley Winslow, the Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT.</p>
<p>Mastandrea’s time at Caltech, with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the summer after her sophomore year, provided a change of pace. There, she helped the LIGO team simulate black hole mergers, and was on the ground floor during some of the crucial discoveries that led to LIGO’s <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/ligo-first-detection-gravitational-waves-0211">monumental paper on gravitational waves</a> from neutron star mergers — experiences that made for “the most exciting summer.” But at the time, the LIGO team still hadn’t collected quite enough data from actual black hole mergers to run in the simulation she was working on. For Mastandrea, using the data from CERN in her current research is particularly exciting and meaningful.</p>
<p>“It feels like a true physics analysis. … I’m actually investigating the world, not just the fake world that I generate,” she says.</p>
<p><strong>Dancing out of the lab</strong></p>
<p>Mastandrea had never tried the Indian dance form called bhangra before coming to college. She’d played the trumpet for a long time, and she figured she would keep playing as an out-of-lab outlet. In time, though, she discovered she wasn’t enjoying it as much as she’d hoped. She decided to try something new.</p>
<p>“I was just surprised by how much fun it was,” she says, describing how she joined MIT’s bhangra dance team. “The people I met were so friendly.”</p>
<p>Mastandrea says that dancing is “a different kind of stress” than her work in the lab. Bhangra is no casual exercise —&nbsp;it’s high-energy and a little exhausting —&nbsp;but for Mastandrea, a co-captain of the team, it’s more rewarding than it is strenuous.</p>
<p>“The whole dance is meant to be an expression of joy,” she says. “It’s meant to engage people, and you have to make people not only love watching you, but you have to make them want to join you when you’re done. It’s definitely an amazing experience.”</p>
<p>When she’s not bringing joy through dance, she’s experiencing it through food — she loves to cook. She has a profound adoration for tomatoes — she’ll bite into them like they’re apples, she admits with a grin.&nbsp;One day, she says, she’d love to take time off and attend culinary school. For now, though, she gets her fill of cooking entertainment from Food Network’s “Cutthroat Kitchen,” in which chefs foil each other’s plans as they vie for dominance.</p>
<p><strong>“Throwing yourself into a hugely different part of your life”</strong></p>
<p>On the humanities side of her education, one of Mastandrea’s favorite parts of MIT is the philosophy department.</p>
<p>“From what I can tell … they make a real effort to engage undergraduates and make things interesting, and also just to talk with them. They’re very accessible, and that’s great when the problems that philosophy covers are so broad and require this discussion,” she says.</p>
<p>She’s also currently enrolled in a playwriting class. She gives credit to the theater department for creating such a unique experience for MIT students.</p>
<p>“Everyone I see is so passionate about science … and then I go here [to a theater class]. … I see the same passion about something completely different, throwing yourself into a hugely different part of your life, and … casting yourself out and trying something new. There’s no better way to do that than with the theater classes.”</p>
<p>In addition to classes, there are many individuals she is grateful to have met at MIT. She credits her research advisor, Jesse Thaler, and Lindley Winslow, who is both the advisor for the Undergraduate Women in Physics group (which Mastandrea is president of) and Mastandrea’s former research advisor, with helping transform her “from a person who studies physics, who takes physics classes, to someone who … is beginning to think and research with the mindset of a physicist.” Her academic advisor, Michael McDonald, has also been an important resource to her throughout her time here.</p>
<p>After graduating, Mastandrea plans to continue her education in graduate school and wants to keep researching. Maybe her work will lead her toward an answer to the ultimate question — what makes up the universe as we know it.</p>
<p>“Understanding what matter is made of tells us what matter can do, and how it can act in the world,” she says. “And we need to know the very basic constituents … knowing what things are made of tells us everything.”</p>
Radha Mastandrea wants to know what the universe is made of.Image: Ian MacLellanProfiles, Students, Undergraduate, Physics, School of Science, Arts, LIGO, Black holes, Philosophy, School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, Women in STEM, Laboratory for Nuclear ScienceTranslating research into impacthttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-fourth-tata-center-symposium-highlights-need-translate-research-into-impact-1017
Fourth annual Tata Center Symposium highlights the need to invest in technologies for the developing world from a market-driven perspective.Wed, 17 Oct 2018 12:40:00 -0400Shivangi Misra | Tata Center for Technology and Designhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-fourth-tata-center-symposium-highlights-need-translate-research-into-impact-1017<p>The MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design&nbsp;has funded upwards of 100 projects since its inception,&nbsp;and finds itself at a crucial juncture of identifying market opportunities for some of its advanced-stage projects that require further support in order to be turned into profitable social enterprises.</p>
<p>The Tata Center was&nbsp;first established at MIT six years ago&nbsp;by a generous donation provided by one of India’s oldest philanthropic organizations, Tata Trusts. With several advanced-stage projects now in the pipeline, the center’s leadership recognized a need to answer a fundamental question: How can the Tata Center provide further support, and what might&nbsp;that&nbsp;support look like, to research projects that have reached a state of maturity?</p>
<p>The center's recently-concluded fourth annual symposium and workshop, a two-day event hosted at the Samberg Conference Center titled “Translating Research into Impact,”&nbsp;aimed to do just that.</p>
<p>“This is a preoccupation for us. We’re no longer looking for things to do, we’ve found things to do. And we’ve brought technologies to a point at which they’re ready to go out into the world in the form of helpful products and services,” Tata Center Director Rob Stoner said as he welcomed students, industry partners, faculty, non-governmental organization representatives, and government officials from both India and the U.S. to the conference. “So, our focus has become&nbsp;translation —&nbsp;handing off technologies that may have reached the prototype or demonstration stage at MIT to entrepreneurial firms, government agencies, NGOs —&nbsp;anyone who has the vision and commitment to bring them to scale in India.&nbsp;It takes a focused effort to do that successfully.”</p>
<p>Stoner was&nbsp;joined at the conference by Manoj Kumar, head of entrepreneurship and innovations at Tata Trusts and Maurizio Vecchione, the executive vice presdient of&nbsp;Global Good and Research, which is a collaboration between Intellectual Ventures and the Gates Foundation.</p>
<p>In his&nbsp;opening keynote address, The Power of Developing World Technology: Reverse Innovation, Vecchione stressed the importance of investing in technologies for the developing world from a market-driven perspective. Focusing on the health care sector, Vecchione emphasized the need to dramatically increase research and development budgets targeted toward finding solutions for diseases like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis in the developing world. The world’s population, primarily led by developing countries like China, India, Nigeria, and Mexico, is projected to reach 9 billion by 2040.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The keynote was followed by a panel on scaling social enterprises with Jessica Alderman, the director of communications for&nbsp;Envirofit International;&nbsp;Alex Eaton, CEO of Sistema Biobolsa and Charity;&nbsp;and Manoj Sinha, CEO of&nbsp;Husk Power Systems. One of the core issues that emerged during the panel was the perceived dichotomy of impact versus profit.</p>
<p>“The idea of profit is important. And profit is absolutely tied to impact,” Alderman said.&nbsp;“You will have a short-lived company if you don’t have a solid way of getting to profit.”</p>
<p>Symposium attendees were also introduced to new Tata Center startups and multiple advanced-stage projects working on techologies including:</p>
<ul>
<li>urine-based tuberculosis diagnostics;</li>
<li>affordable silicon-based nanofiltration;</li>
<li>accessible intraperitoneal chemotherapy devices;</li>
<li>intelligence deployment to improve agri-supply chains; and</li>
<li>photovoltaic-powered village-scale desalination systems.</li>
</ul>
<p>The first day came to a close with a&nbsp;fireside chat with Ernest Moniz, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Emeritus&nbsp;and former U.S.&nbsp;Secretary of Energy, followed by a town hall on funding social innovations with Ann Dewitt, COO of The Engine, Barry Johnson of the National Science Foundation, and Harkesh Kumar Mittal from&nbsp;India’s Department of Science and Technology.</p>
<p>On the second day of the conference, Ann Mei Chang, the author of&nbsp;“Lean Impact” and former chief innovation officer at USAID, delivered an inspiring keynote address on the importance of thinking big, starting small, and pursuing impact relentlessly.</p>
<p>This second day was dedicated to parallel sectorial workshops on Tata Center’s six focus areas:&nbsp;housing, health, agriculture, energy, environment, and water. Workshop participants included faculty from MIT, the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, Tata Fellows, active Tata Center collaborators,&nbsp;industry representatives, and&nbsp;representatives of some of India’s most influential NGOs.</p>
<p>“So many projects end up not leaving the institution because of gaps in our support ecosystem,”&nbsp;Stoner said, drawing the event to a close. “We’re determined at the Tata Center not to let that happen with our projects by filling those gaps.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>The MIT Tata Center’s efforts to build connections in the developing world are linked to MIT’s broader campaign to engage with global challenges, and to translate innovative research into entrepreneurial impact. That work continues year-round. The next Tata Center Symposium will be held at MIT on Sept.&nbsp;12&nbsp;and 13, 2019.</p>
A panel discusses Scaling Social Enterprises at the fourth annual Tata Center Symposium.Photo: Kelley Travers/MIT Energy InitiativeWater, Health, Environment, Housing, Architecture, MIT Sloan School of Management, Mechanical engineering, Chemical engineering, Collaboration, International development, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E), Developing countries, India, Special events and guest speakers, School of Engineering, MIT Energy InitiativeMIT STEAM Camp in Hong Kong blends mind and hand for middle school studentshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-hong-kong-steam-camp-blending-mind-and-hand-1003
MIT&#039;s pK-12 Action Group collaborates with the Chinese International School to bring faculty, staff, and students together for hands-on learning. Wed, 03 Oct 2018 15:35:01 -0400Chuck Leddy | Office of Open Learninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-hong-kong-steam-camp-blending-mind-and-hand-1003<p>MIT has long been a global leader in STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics — education, driving innovation not only in the fields themselves but also in the ways it gets designed and delivered. Learning, of course, doesn’t just happen on campus or in a classroom setting. This summer, the MIT <a href="http://pk12.mit.edu/" target="_blank">pK-12 Action Group</a>, in collaboration with the Chinese International School (CIS) in Hong Kong, held its second annual MIT STEAM camp, bringing faculty, staff, and students together with just over 200 middle-school aged students and 30 teachers from the area for two weeks of hands-on learning.</p>
<p>According to pK-12 Action Group co-chair Professor Eric Klopfer, the group’s goal is “to create programs that engage growing numbers of diverse learners and educators through design, research, and implementation of educational innovations.” The project-based MIT STEAM camp aimed to do just that. Embodying the Institute’s &nbsp;“mens-et-manus” (mind-and-hand) learning approach, students in Hong Kong learned from various hands-on activities and explored the use of digital technologies and tools (such as <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Scratch</a>, among others) to promote creativity, invention, and collaboration.</p>
<p>The theme of this summer’s MIT STEAM Camp was “Into The Water,” drawing inspiration from the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The six learning modules used in the program were developed by groups across MIT’s campus. The <a href="https://edgerton.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Edgerton Center</a>, for instance, helped develop “Engineering with Water,” while an alumna of the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanograpic Institute Joint Program and MIT employee developed “Algae in our backyard: An ArtScience Exploration.” Other modules included observing small ocean crustaceans, understanding the effects of ocean acidification, and programming an EEG-driven “boat” (with Lego WeDo motors inside) that navigated around giant beach balls. Students also experimented and played with Scratch and other peripherals as an introduction to playful learning.</p>
<p>Participating campers then took these learning modules a step further, working collaboratively and applying the knowledge and skills they acquired to designing and building innovative projects. By the end of the two-week camp, students built projects ranging from board games to portable microscope projectors to two-tier structures that generated electricity through a dam.</p>
<p><strong>Teachers learn, too</strong></p>
<p>There was also a strong professional development component to the MIT STEAM camp. As part of the pK-12 Action Group’s mission, teachers participated in educator workshops parallel to the student campers. Led by the MIT team, local educators were exposed to the pedagogies and practices that drove the development of the camp’s modules, including approaches to have students experiment, build working models, make mistakes, and learn through iteration.</p>
<p>Joe Diaz '10, pK-12 Action Group program coordinator, explained that the teachers “observe how project-based learning can be used and are hopefully inspired to create and implement their own STEAM projects in their own classrooms during the school year.”</p>
<p>The MIT STEAM Camp succeeded in building important new capabilities among various stakeholders. “I saw this when students who had never used a hand drill picked one up and learned to drive a screw into a piece of wood,” explained Diaz. “I saw this when teachers realized that they could build working circuits that could be used to supplement their classroom activities. I saw this when our MIT student facilitators realized that they had empowered their students to make their ideas a reality, even in their short time together.”</p>
<p><strong>New approaches to learning</strong></p>
<p>Local students and teachers, as well as the MIT team, “came away from the MIT STEAM camp with a new way to look at how learning happens, one that combines learning while doing and connects to students’ interests and passion,” said Claudia Urrea PhD '07 PhD, associate director of pK-12 at the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (<a href="https://jwel.mit.edu/" target="_blank">J-WEL</a>) and founder of the STEAM Camp. “This is possible when students from different ages and schools get together around projects they care about and propose their own solutions to issues related to their local context.”</p>
<p>The eleven MIT student facilitators who traveled to run the modules in the classrooms were also invaluable. Their unique styles of teaching directly impacted the way the modules took shape. They worked directly with the Hong Kong students, bringing the modules to life.</p>
<p>Going from classroom learning about water to actually building a model of a hydroelectric dam, as STEAM Camp students and teachers did, was much more than an achievement of design. It holds the promise of becoming a template for how camp participants learn and teach for today and tomorrow, spreading MIT’s “mens-et-manus” approach to learning to different parts of the globe.</p>
<p>The STEAM Camp was made possible by the generous support of Vic Lee.</p>
Young learners at the Chinese International School build their own project with guidance from rising MIT junior Rana Odabas.K-12 education, MITili, STEM education, Arts, China, Edgerton, Woods Hole, Students, Classes and programs, International initiatives, Office of Open Learning, Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), Education, teaching, academicsOne man’s flying car dream is taking off, thanks to MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-professional-education-student-felipe-varon-flying-car-dream-taking-off-0926
Felipe Varon uses knowledge gained from MIT Professional Education to improve his invention; hopes cars might service areas with low access to food and supplies.Wed, 26 Sep 2018 17:00:00 -0400Greg Wayland | MIT Professional Educationhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-professional-education-student-felipe-varon-flying-car-dream-taking-off-0926<p>Most children dream about fabulous flying machines. For electrical engineer Felipe Varon, it was a flying car. Now, a prototype he's developed is making test flights in his native Colombia, thanks to his experience with MIT Professional Education.</p>
<p>“As a child, I dreamed about flying,” says Varon, a graduate of MIT Professional Education’s&nbsp;<a href="https://professional.mit.edu/programs/short-programs/professional-certificate-program-innovation-and-technology">Professional Certificate Program in Innovation and Technology</a>. “But I don’t want just a cool toy. I want something with social impact to help people and cities. Something people can use today, not in some future time.”</p>
<p>Varon says MIT Professional Education (PE) provided the knowledge, training, and ideas he needed to upscale his invention in size, power and capability, and for strategies to finance, market, and mass produce it. In 2018, he completed courses including Beyond Smart Cities and Radical Innovation, Mastering Innovation and&nbsp;Design-Thinking, and Precision Engineering Principles for Mechanical Design.</p>
<p>MIT PE Executive Director Bhaskar Pant says entrepreneurs and innovators like Varon&nbsp;“are at the heart of our student population.”</p>
<p>“He is a great example of how people use knowledge gained from our certificate programs to drive innovation and leadership towards meaningful change,” Pant says.</p>
<p>A flying car was the subject of Varon’s 2006 graduate thesis at the Universidad Externo de Colombia.</p>
<p>“I put together this machine,” he says. “I knew a motor and propellers could make it fly, kind of like a table with four legs.”</p>
<p>Varon could be describing a drone, and the skies were already full of them. But he&nbsp;took drone technology to the next level. The company he founded with two partners, <a href="http://varonvehicles.com/" target="_blank">Varon Vehicles Corporation</a>, built a prototype flying car designed to&nbsp;travel in its own lane, at low altitudes, safely clear of both land-bound and aeronautic traffic.</p>
<p>The car looks like&nbsp;a shiny red, two-seated blend of a Batmobile and Agent 007’s Aston Martin. The vehicle is entirely electric, with neither wheels nor wings, and Varon’s company logo — a multi-layered “V” —&nbsp;on the hood.</p>
<p>“It’s very simple,” he says. “It doesn’t have any dials, buttons or strange pilot stuff. It steers just like a car. We’re trying to make it drivable by anybody. A computer does all the work.”</p>
<p>The design of the car&nbsp;has the sheen of power and luxury, which belies the high-flying altruistic purposes Varon and his partners foresee for their low-flying dream pod.</p>
<p>“We’re not focused on designing and building flying cars to sell them,” Varon says. “It would be for a service. And if I can get away with it, I would like the service to be free.”</p>
<p>He says it could go where traffic and congestion are a problem, or there’s a lack of public transportation.</p>
<p>“In developing countries, you have areas with low accessibility, low quality of life,” he says. “Nutritious food and other necessities can’t get to those in need. It would take an hour and a half to reach them. A flying car would take only 17 to 20 minutes.”</p>
<p>Varon and his partners did a soft-launch for the prototype in Colombia and received positive feedback. He says he’s also been invited to launch it&nbsp;in European countries and is in conversation with aeronautical regulatory authorities there. Similarly, he hopes to approach the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S., and is looking at a possible test site in Texas.</p>
<p>“We’ve tried to identify a market niche within an industry that hasn’t even appeared yet,” Varon says.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Varon is still searching for a clean power source.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“We’re clean at the point where we charge,” he says, “but what happens behind the grid?”</p>
<p>He envisions someday sharing assets with a hydro-electric power entity. “We don’t want to have a (negative) environmental impact,” he says. “We want to have a favorable social and economic impact, even providing jobs. We’re going to have a fleet of cars, so we’re going to need a fleet of drivers.”</p>
Felipe Varon says he hopes his vehicle can have an impact in developing countries where traffic and congestion are a problem, or where there’s a lack of transportation infrastructure.Image courtesy of Felipe VaronDesign, Transportation, Autonomous vehicles, Drones, Invention, MIT Professional Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E)Creating 3-D-printed “motion sculptures” from 2-D videos https://news.mit.edu/2018/creating-3-d-printed-motion-sculptures-from-2-d-videos-mit-csail-0919
CSAIL system could help athletes, dancers, and others better analyze how they move.Tue, 18 Sep 2018 23:59:59 -0400Rachel Gordon | CSAILhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/creating-3-d-printed-motion-sculptures-from-2-d-videos-mit-csail-0919<p>New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady has often credited his success to spending countless hours <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/feb/03/tom-brady-patriots-game-film-belichick-study">studying his opponent’s movements on film</a>. This understanding of movement is necessary for all living species, whether it’s figuring out the best angle for throwing a ball, or perceiving the motion of predators and prey. But simple videos can’t actually give us the full picture.</p>
<p>That’s because traditional videos and photos for studying motion are two-dimensional, and don’t show us the underlying 3-D structure of the person or subject of interest. Without the full geometry, we can’t inspect the small and subtle movements that help us move faster or make sense of the precision needed to perfect our athletic form.</p>
<p>Recently, though, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have come up with a way to get a better handle on this understanding of complex motion.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The new system uses an algorithm that can take 2-D videos and turn them into 3-D-printed “motion sculptures” that show how a human body moves through space.</p>
<p>In addition to being an intriguing aesthetic visualization of shape and time, the “MoSculp” system could enable a much more detailed study of motion for professional athletes, dancers, or anyone who wants to improve their physical skills.</p>
<div class="cms-placeholder-content-video"></div>
<p>“Imagine you have a video of Roger Federer serving a ball in a tennis match, and a video of yourself learning tennis,” says PhD student Xiuming Zhang, lead author of a new paper about the system. “You could then build motion sculptures of both scenarios to compare them and more comprehensively study where you need to improve.”</p>
<p>Because motion sculptures are 3-D, users can use a computer interface to navigate around the structures and see them from different viewpoints, revealing motion-related information inaccessible from the original viewpoint.</p>
<p>Zhang wrote the paper alongside MIT professors of electrical engineering and computer science William Freeman and Stefanie Mueller, PhD student Jiajun Wu, Google researchers Qiurui He and Tali Dekel, as well as&nbsp;former CSAIL PhD students Andrew Owens and Tianfan Xue.</p>
<p><strong>Bodies in motion</strong></p>
<p>Artists and scientists have long struggled to gain better insight into movement, limited by their own camera lenses and what they could provide.</p>
<p>Previous work has mostly used so-called “stroboscopic” photography techniques, which look a lot like the images in a flip book stitched together. But since these photos only show snapshots of movement, viewers wouldn’t be able to see as much of the trajectory of a person’s arm when they’re hitting a golf ball, for example.</p>
<p>What’s more, these photographs also require laborious preshoot setup, such as using a clean background and specialized depth cameras and lighting equipment. All MoSculp needs is a video sequence.</p>
<p>Given an input video, the system first automatically detects 2-D key points on the subject’s body, such as the hip, knee, and ankle of a ballerina while she’s doing a complex dance sequence. Then, it takes the best possible poses from those points to be turned into 3-D “skeletons.”</p>
<p>After stitching these skeletons together, the system generates a motion sculpture that can be 3-D-printed, showing the smooth, continuous path of movement traced out by the subject. Users can customize their figures to focus on different body parts, assign different materials to distinguish among parts, and even customize lighting.</p>
<p>In user studies, the researchers found that over 75 percent of subjects felt that MoSculp provided a more detailed visualization for studying motion than the standard photography techniques.</p>
<p>“Dance and highly skilled athletic motions often seem like ‘moving sculptures’ but they only create fleeting and ephemeral shapes,” says Aaron Hertzmann, a principal scientist at Adobe's Creative Intelligence Lab who was not involved in the research. “This work shows how to take motions and turn them into real sculptures with objective visualizations of movement, providing a way for athletes to analyze their movements for training, requiring no more equipment than a mobile camera and some computing time.”</p>
<p>The system works best for larger movements, like throwing a ball or taking a sweeping leap during a dance sequence. It also works for situations that might obstruct or complicate movement, such as if people are wearing loose clothing or carrying objects.</p>
<p>Currently, the system only uses single-person scenarios, but the team soon hopes to expand to multiple people. This could open up the potential to study things like social disorders, interpersonal interactions, and team dynamics.</p>
<p>The team will present their paper on the system next month at the User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) conference in Berlin, Germany.</p>
An MIT system uses an algorithm that can take 2-D videos and turn them into 3-D-printed “motion sculptures” that show how a human body moves through space.Image courtesy of MIT CSAILComputer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), School of Engineering, 3-D printing, Arts, Computer vision, Mechanical engineering, Video, Human-computer interaction, Design, Computer graphicsAna Miljacki: Scholar of designers and dreamershttps://news.mit.edu/2018/faculty-profile-ana-miljacki-0906
Historian, curator, and designer studies architects and their quest to make a better world.Wed, 05 Sep 2018 23:59:59 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/faculty-profile-ana-miljacki-0906<p>Inside Ana Miljacki’s office in MIT’s Department of Architecture, a sign hangs on the wall bearing a wry message:</p>
<p align="center">UTOPIA IS HERE<br />
JUST FOR TODAY</p>
<p>By itself, that sign could be a lot of things: an earnest plea to enjoy the moment, an ironic commentary on the futility of seeking perfection, or a wistful nod to the impermanence of everything.</p>
<p>In Miljacki’s case, it is all of those, and a reference to architects she has studied and written about. Miljacki is an architectural historian, curator, and designer who has written books on postwar design, co-curated the U.S. pavillion at Venice Biennale, and heads the Master of Architecture program at MIT.</p>
<p>Miljacki’s first book was about the hopes and compromises of architects in postwar Czechoslovakia, covering the first three decades of their attempts to develop roles within the larger project of “constructing socialism.” Some of them, such as a group called SIAL from Liberec, made what Miljacki calls “a genuine effort to practice utopia” under the circumstances.</p>
<p>In terms of architecture, Miljacki has written, this meant that “utopia was no longer synonymous with the production of fantastical images of a perfect world sometime and somewhere else.” For the designers of SIAL themselves, this meant an “attempt to work out an effective role for architecture and architects within the confines” of a repressive political system.</p>
<p>Thus the SIAL architects had dreams but were realists, and the tension between these two things defined their careers.</p>
<p>“I have empathy for architects who operated in that context,” Miljacki says. “I don’t try to simplify the story, but I’m not unsympathetic to what they were trying to do, including survive.”</p>
<p>Today, in a very different time and place, Miljacki still ponders these ideas when evaluating her own career. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“Utopia is never something to strive for as a complete and frozen condition,” Miljacki says. But she is an idealist about the discipline of architecture, and, above all, about teaching it to MIT students. Indeed, Miljacki says, the best way to think about teaching is as a form of utopia.</p>
<p>“The classroom is where I practice and cultivate a kind of utopia with my students, in the best possible sense,” she says.</p>
<p><strong>Beginning in Belgrade</strong></p>
<p>By Miljacki’s account, it is unsurprising that she became a architect. She grew up in Belgrade as the child of two architects who designed “large swaths of housing” for the former Yugoslavia.</p>
<p>“For me, architecture seemed an obvious choice,” Miljacki recounts. She went to an architectural high school in Belgrade and was accepted to architectural college in Belgrade, just as the Yugoslavian war was breaking out in the early 1990s. Helped by a family friend, Miljacki spent a year attending high school and applying to colleges in the U.S.</p>
<p>“I’d never been to the U.S., but I was always dreaming of big things,” Miljacki says. And she got a full scholarship to Bennington College, the liberal arts college in Vermont.</p>
<p>“A liberal arts school as a model didn’t exist in my world,” Miljacki says, “but I suddenly had room to think about philosophy and literature and architecture and set design in the same context.” Moreover, Bennington’s educational philosophy — including no letter grades for students — helped her become a better, more inquisitive student.</p>
<p>“Bennington had no grades, and I had been a very good ‘A’ student, so I knew what it took to get good grades,” Miljacki recounts, calling the new model “an important shock to the system.” Instead, she notes, “[w]ith grades irrelevant, we were all left to our own — and our teachers’ — more nuanced judgment about what was relevant. I began working to satisfy my own standards, not somebody else’s, and I think that was really important for me at that moment in time.”</p>
<p>Miljacki then got her MA in architecture at Rice University, and entered the PhD program at Harvard University — where she wrote about postwar Czech architects and their struggles to practice and live under socialism as her dissertation.</p>
<p>In doing so, Miljacki was, in a distant way, digging into her own past, given her parents’ lives as architects in the former Yugoslavia. Her writing about Czech architects was “informed by my experiences in Serbian context, having watched my parents there. But I didn’t want to be a historian of my backyard.”</p>
<p>Miljacki’s academic career then took her to Columbia University, before she was hired on to the MIT faculty. For her research, design projects, and teaching, she was granted tenure in 2017.</p>
<p><strong>Next in Venice</strong></p>
<p>Miljacki’s own design projects are numerous. She has been principal in the design firm Project_ since 2002, and has designed and curated a long list of exhibitions. The highest-profile of these efforts was the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2014, called “OfficeUS” and co-curated by Miljacki, Eva Franch I Gilabert, now director of the Architectural Association school in London, and Ashley Schafer, a professor at Ohio State University.</p>
<p>Spurred by the event’s director, famed architect Rem Koolhaas, to dig into architectural history, the U.S. pavilion depicted a modernist office with pamphlets on the wall that themselves presented historical research about the spread of U.S. architecture around the world during a period when the country’s “soft power” expanded globally.</p>
<p>“The century has been the ‘American Century,’ so the pavilion had a real responsibility to think about how the U.S. had impacted the world during that century,” Miljacki says. “Our project, OfficeUS, was about starting a conversation. It was the first time the body of American architecture abroad was ever constituted as such.”</p>
<p>Miljacki also recently co-edited a book of essays about the architectural profession and issues of authorship, influence, reproduction, and copyright.</p>
<p>“[People] are exposed to immense amounts of work, through images,” Miljacki says. “This is unprecedented. And so … there is much more copying in the most superficial of ways, across the board.”</p>
<p>Still, beyond research, writing, designing, and curating, Miljacki emphasizes that she always feels at home while teaching.</p>
<p>“It’s always been about students first,” Miljacki says. “And the MIT students are amazing. … They are both earnest and sophisticated. They are thoughtful and open to being taught, and they’re good students.” She adds, “The students at MIT have the best time. They are able to go across the spectrum of our discipline groups and faculty, and in the end tailor their particular academic diets to their own interests.”</p>
<p>So while life as an architecture student may never be utopian, thanks to people like Miljacki, it is getting closer, day by day.</p>
“The classroom is where I practice and cultivate a kind of utopia with my students, in the best possible sense,” says Associate Professor Ana Miljacki.Image: Bryce VickmarkSchool of Architecture and Planning, Architecture, Faculty, Profile, Design, History, HumanitiesSoftware tool could help architects design efficient buildingshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/software-tool-could-help-architects-design-efficient-buildings-0905
MIT researchers develop inexpensive way to perform full lifecycle analysis of design choices as buildings are being planned.Wed, 05 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0400David L. Chandler | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/software-tool-could-help-architects-design-efficient-buildings-0905<p>Typically, when architects or engineers design a new building, it’s only at the end of the process — if ever — that a lifecycle analysis of the building’s environmental impact is carried out. And by then, it may be too late to make significant changes. Now, a faster and easier system for doing such analyses could change all that, making the analysis an integral part of the design process from the beginning.</p>
<p>The new process, described in the journal <em>Building and Environment</em> in a paper by MIT researchers Jeremy Gregory, Franz-Josef Ulm and Randolph Kirchain, and recent graduate Joshua Hester PhD ’18, is simple enough that it could be integrated into the software already used by building designers so that it becomes a seamless addition to their design process.</p>
<p>Lifecycle analysis, known as LCA, is a process of examining all the materials; design elements; location and orientation; heating, cooling, and other energy systems; and expected ultimate disposal of a building, in terms of costs, environmental impacts, or both. Ulm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSH), says that typically LCA is applied “only when a building is fully designed, so it is rather a post-mortem tool but not an actual design tool.” That’s what the team set out to correct.</p>
<p>“We wanted to address how to bridge that gap between using LCA at the end of the process and getting architects and engineers to use it as a design tool,” he says. The big question was whether it would be possible to incorporate LCA evaluations into the design process without having it impose too many restrictions on the design choices, thus making it unappealing to the building designers. Ulm wondered, “How much does the LCA restrict the flexibility of the design?”</p>
<p><strong>Measuring freedom of design</strong></p>
<p>To address that question systematically, the team had to come up with a process of measuring the flexibility of design choices in a quantitative way. They settled on a measure they call “entropy,” analogous to the use of that term in physics. In physics, a system with greater entropy is “hotter,” with its molecules moving around rapidly. In the team’s use of the term, higher entropy represents a greater variety of available choices at a given point, while lower entropy represents a more restricted range of choices.</p>
<p>To the researchers’ surprise, they found use of their LCA system had very little impact on reducing the range of design choices. “That’s the most remarkable result,” Ulm says. When introducing the LCA into the early stages of the design process, “you barely touch the design flexibility,” he says. “I was convinced we would come to a compromise,” where design flexibility would have to be limited in order to gain better lifecycle performance, Ulm says. “But in fact, the results proved me wrong.”</p>
<p>The system looks at the full range of climate impacts from a new structure, including all three phases: construction, including examining the embodied energy in all the materials used in the building; operation of the building, including all of the energy sources needed to provide heating, cooling, and electrical service; and the final dismantling and disposal, or repurposing of the structure, at the end of its service.</p>
<p>To evaluate the lifecycle impact of design choices requires looking at a wide range of factors. These include: the location’s climate (for their research, they chose Arizona and New England as two very different cases of U.S. climate); the building’s dimensions and orientation; the ratio of walls to windows on each side; the materials used for walls, foundations, and roofing; the type of heating and cooling systems used; and so on. As each of these factors gets decided, the range of possibilities for the building get narrower and narrower — but not much more so than in any conventional design process.</p>
<p>At any point, the program “would also provide information about a lot of the things that are not yet defined,” essentially offering a menu of choices that could lead to a more environmentally friendly design, says Kirchain, who is a principal research scientist at MIT and co-director of the CSH, which supported the project.</p>
<p>While designed particularly for reducing the climate impact of a building, the same tool could also be used to optimize a building for other criteria, such as simply to minimize cost, the researchers say.</p>
<p><strong>Getting in early</strong></p>
<p>Thinking about issues such as the ultimate fate of a building at the end of its functional life tends to be “not in the same order of interest for the designing architect, when they first work on a design,” compared to more immediate factors such as how the building will look to the client, and meeting any particular functional requirements for the structure, Ulm says. But if the new LCA tools are integrated right into the design software they are using, then indications of how a given design choice can affect the outcome would be constantly available and able to easily influence choices even in small, subtle ways early in the process.</p>
<p>By comparing the design process with and without the use of such tools, the researchers found that the overall greenhouse gas emissions associated with a building could be reduced by 75 percent “without a reduction in the flexibility of the design process,” Ulm says.</p>
<p>Ulm compares it to indicators in a gym that provide feedback on how many calories are being burned at any point in an exercise regime, providing a constant incentive to improve results — without ever prescribing what exercises the person should do or how to do them.</p>
<p>While the program is currently designed to evaluate relatively simple single-family homes — which represent the vast majority of living spaces in the U.S. — the team hopes to expand it to be able to work on much bigger residential or commercial buildings as well.</p>
<p>At this point, the software the team designed is a standalone package, so “one of our tasks going forward is to actually transition to making it a plug-in to some of the software tools that are out there” for architectural design, says Kirchain.</p>
<p>While there are many software tools available to help with evaluating a building’s environmental impact, Kirchain says, “we don’t see a lot of architects using these tools.” But that’s partly because these tend to be too prescriptive, he says, pointing toward an optimal design and constricting the designer’s choices. “Our theory is that any designer doesn’t want to be told that this is how the design must be. Their role is to design without undue constraints,” he says.</p>
Fengdi Guo, a graduate student in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is shown here working on the project.Image: Randy KirchainResearch, School of Engineering, Civil and environmental engineering, Concrete, Materials Research Laboratory, Architecture, Urban studies and planning, Sustainability, Design, Emissions, Climate change, EnergyStudents welcomed back to renovated New House as semester beginshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-students-welcomed-back-renovated-new-house-0903
Redesigned building connects living groups with improved accessibility.Mon, 03 Sep 2018 09:03:00 -0400Cooper Toulmin | MIT Facilitieshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-students-welcomed-back-renovated-new-house-0903<p>Approximately 290 students recently moved into their newly renovated home, thanks to a concerted team effort to complete the reconstruction of New House in time for the start of the fall semester. The 14-month construction project followed months of planning in which the architects, student residents, and staff from the Division of Student Life (DSL) and Campus Construction worked together to envision the future needs of the community. The result — a residence with improved connectivity between houses, new amenities (including cluster kitchens and quiet lounges in each house), enhanced accessibility, green roofs, and revitalized courtyards.</p>
<p>“Renovating a residence hall is a tall order at any time,” said Suzy Nelson, vice president and dean for student life. “Everyone involved — students, faculty, staff, and the architects and project managers — did a fantastic job of balancing the desires of residents with the needs of an up-to-date residence hall and MIT’s expectations for the future. And to get that all done in a year is truly extraordinary.”</p>
<p>The decision to renovate the more than 40-year-old, 115,000 square-foot residence was based on results of a 2016 feasibility study conducted by the Office of Campus Planning and the MIT Capital Projects group.</p>
<p>“While this project has helped drive down our deferred maintenance, what it has really done is demonstrate our desire to enhance the living and learning environment for our students for the 21st century, and work with each community to develop how each building can better support their needs,” says David Friedrich, senior director of housing operations and renewal planning.</p>
<p><strong>Flexible design features focus on community</strong></p>
<p>Constructed in 1975, New House is home to a community that encompasses nine living groups, including the cultural groups Chocolate City, French House, German House, iHouse, and Spanish House. The primary goals of the renovation included retaining the 288-bed count in New House, which was achieved, and preserving the nine communities while enhancing the connections among the houses. A 275-foot corridor now runs the entire length of the building, enabling residents to easily and accessibly move between communities on every level. The new design’s flexibility lets the communities’ populations change and allows for adaptability in assigning rooms to residents.</p>
<p>Goody Clancy led the redesign effort, collaborating with students and student life staff to understand residents’ needs. Using <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/committee-completes-work-on-guidance-for-future-dorms-1020" target="_blank">MIT’s Architectural Principles</a>, the teams envisioned the ground-floor arcade as the heart of the building with shared features such as a large community-shared country kitchen and an expanded multi-purpose room, makerspace, laundry, and fitness room located along its path. Placement of these features next to the house lounge on the arcade level enables those spaces to spill out onto the adjacent courtyards, providing an open, communal space encouraging creative connections among students.</p>
<p>In addition, large windows in the arcade level bring in views of the Charles River and allow more daylight. “Taking down the large wall that was in place on the north side of the arcade has opened up a north-south view through the ground floor, bringing the outside in,” says Goody Clancy Associate Amanda Sanders.</p>
<p>Some of New House’s added construction features and improvements include:</p>
<ul>
<li>a first-floor arcade that includes a house lounge, game room, the shared country kitchen, expanded makerspace, multi-purpose room, laundry room, fitness room, and music room;</li>
<li>a new roof, along with six green roofs facing Memorial Drive that absorb water and reduce water waste;</li>
<li>new energy-efficient windows throughout the building;</li>
<li>connecting corridors on the upper floors with two new elevators providing accessibility;</li>
<li>accessible student rooms and bathrooms in each community;</li>
<li>revitalized courtyards providing social space for occupants; and</li>
<li>a new covered 150-bike storage enclosure.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Creative work phasing minimized student relocations</strong></p>
<p>One of the challenges to this whole-building renovation was managing the construction in phases to ensure that a number of New House residents could continue to live in the building for the 2017-18 academic year. By staging the work in phases and maintaining one unoccupied house as a buffer against construction noise, 100 residents continued to live in the building. This creative approach, managed and coordinated by Suffolk Construction Company, minimized the need for students to relocate.</p>
<p>“The students who lived in New House during construction were an integral part of the success of this project,” says Kevin Carr, project manager for Campus Construction. “We hosted a welcome back pizza party and a building tour when the students returned in January after phase one was complete, and the positive feedback was overwhelming, and it really touched us in a special way.”</p>
<p><strong>Community engagement laid foundation for redesign</strong></p>
<p>As with many projects on campus, the community engagement between student residents, student life staff, and the construction and design teams regarding the design and direction of New House was critical to the successful completion of the project. The presidents of each of the houses were involved throughout and contributed ideas and opinions right down to color schemes and furniture options.</p>
<p>“In my 17 years as head of house for New House, I saw how the students lived, worked, and connected with one another,” says Wesley Harris, the Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “The freshness and openness that this renovation breathes will be most welcomed by our students, and the new east-west horizontal integration will be a substantial improvement in the quality of life. I also commend all who were involved in this project, including the administration, students, architect, and construction team who did a wonderful job.”</p>
<p>Paul Murphy, program manager for&nbsp;Special Projects, says&nbsp;“this was one of the bigger renovation projects within the past two years for MIT, and it’s a real testament to teamwork and collaboration that it went off without any major hitches and completed on time for students to move back in for the fall semester.”</p>
<p>“When we walk through it now and see students smiling — it’s why we do what we do,” Murphy says.</p>
New energy-efficient windows have been installed throughout the New House building, along with a new roof. Six terraces facing Memorial Drive have been transformed into green roofs that absorb water and reduce water waste.Photo: Robert Benson Photography, courtesy of Goody ClancyFacilities, Student life, Campus buildings and architecture, Architecture, Chancellor, Residential life, CommunityJohn de Monchaux, former dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, dies at 81https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-school-architecture-and-planning-former-dean-john-de-monchaux-dies-0831
Architect and planner remembered as a man who brought people together through a combination of wisdom, optimism, and charm.Fri, 31 Aug 2018 09:40:00 -0400Ken Shulman | School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-school-architecture-and-planning-former-dean-john-de-monchaux-dies-0831<p>Jean Pierre de Monchaux, an idealistic and optimistic planner and architect who served as dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning from 1981 to 1992, passed away on April 30, after living with Parkinson’s disease for 20 years. He was 81.</p>
<p>De Monchaux, also known as John, came to MIT after many years’ professional experience in the United States, the United Kingdom, South America, Australia, and Southeast Asia. His international upbringing in Dublin, Montréal, New York City, Bogotá, Sydney, and London produced lasting memories of life onboard the ocean liners and tramp steamers that ferried him between these places as a boy and young man.&nbsp;</p>
<p>His diverse background informed his vision of urban planning as a conciliatory practice of listening and learning between constituencies and professionals. He understood all of the world’s cities as neighborhoods of a single global village — as shared places of possibility, and of messy meaning, that transcended false notions of order and border.</p>
<p>“John’s legacy is all around us,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “His influence is reflected every day through our classes and research, in our passion to serve the world, and in the thoughtful, caring, and supportive community that is a hallmark of SA+P.”</p>
<p>As dean, de Monchaux was known for his ability to nurture dialogue, to forge consensus, and to build bridges between SA+P and other schools at the Institute. He achieved major milestones in the school’s history, including the completion of the award-winning Rotch Library extension in Building 7,&nbsp;the establishment of the Center for Real Estate (the first program of its kind in the United States),&nbsp;and the opening —&nbsp;in the&nbsp;newly-designed I.M. Pei building — of&nbsp;the Media Lab, an&nbsp;endeavor that de Monchaux was proud to have named after many wordier and narrower possibilities were considered.</p>
<p>After stepping down as dean in 1992, de Monchaux took a four-year partial leave from MIT to serve as general manager of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, a Geneva-based foundation concerned with architecture and urban design as a catalyst for cultural and social development in the Muslim world.</p>
<p>In 1996, he returned to MIT and spent the next dozen years teaching in two departments: Urban Studies and Planning&nbsp;and Architecture. From 1996 until 2004, he served as head of the Special Program in Urban Regional Studies (SPURS), a one-year program designed for mid-career professionals from developing countries.</p>
<p>“He helped many of us, faculty and students alike,&nbsp;to design better cities,” says DUSP department head Eran Ben-Joseph, who worked with de Monchaux in the department. “He was a true friend, mentor, and colleague — a person of genuine integrity, great wisdom, and a gentle soul who will be sorely missed.”</p>
<p>De Monchaux was also a dedicated presence in the Boston design community, serving on the boards of the Boston Society of Architects and the Boston Architectural College, and founding the Boston Civic Design Commission as well as serving as its first chair. He was a trustee of the Boston Foundation for Architecture, and a trustee and overseer of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.</p>
<p>Born in Dublin, Ireland, to a French-Australian family, de Monchaux was educated at St John’s College of the University of Sydney in Australia, and at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where later, in 1971, he would become a member of that school’s second class of Loeb Fellows. He began his teaching career at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College, London, in 1964, the beginning of what would become a long collaboration with then-professor Lord Richard Llewellyn-Davies.</p>
<p>De Monchaux had been admitted to MIT’s bachelor’s in architecture program in 1954 from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, but was unable to afford the tuition and enroll as a student. He returned to MIT in 1981 with a particular dedication to opening the Institute’s doors ever wider.</p>
<p>With his wife, British sociologist Suzanne de Monchaux, as part of the design team, he was principal planner for Milton Keynes, a new city in Buckinghamshire, England, that was conceived in the late 1960s as the crowning achievement of Great Britain’s utopian postwar New Towns Movement. In more than two decades of practice as a planner, primarily with global planning partnership Llewellyn Davies and its successor firms, he played a leading role in advocacy design assistance in Watts, Detroit, and Chicago. He also participated in urban plans and environmental impact studies throughout Australia, China, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, with a particular interest in the developing world, vernacular typologies, and informal urbanisms.</p>
<p>De Monchaux is survived by his twin sons: Nicholas de Monchaux, an associate professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California at Berkeley&nbsp;and a founding partner of the interdisciplinary architecture firm modem; and Thomas de Monchaux, an author, designer, and adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University.</p>
<p>For a story published in 2007 in <em>PLAN</em> on the occasion of de Monchaux’s nominal retirement from teaching, Lois Craig, who served as associate dean, recalled, “He had a method of getting agreement from people, forming friendships and professional alliances that supported his policies.&nbsp;He created a sense of functional togetherness.&nbsp;He was a conciliator and an enabler, bringing people together.”</p>
<p>In that same article, Professor Julian Beinart, who co-taught many urban design studios with de Monchaux, reflected on his colleague’s studio technique: “John always took the epistemologically cool position: Let’s think about your proposition, let’s untie the knots of your argument, to the extent we can, let’s see if we can reframe some of the parts, let’s see where that takes us.”</p>
<p>A memorial service will be held at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, Sept.&nbsp;29, in the MIT Chapel.&nbsp;</p>
As dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, John de Monchaux understood all of the world’s cities as neighborhoods of a single global village.Image courtesy of the School of Architecture and PlanningObituaries, School of Architecture and Planning, Urban studies and planning, Faculty, Architecture, Center for Real Estate, Media LabMindHandHeart plus art at Paint Nitehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mindhandheart-paint-night-social-event-grad-students-0829
Social event gives graduate students an opportunity to paint, unwind, and mingle.Wed, 29 Aug 2018 09:00:00 -0400Maisie O’Brien | MindHandHearthttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mindhandheart-paint-night-social-event-grad-students-0829<p>The skies were varying shades of blue, and the trees were drawn in different shapes and colors. Some of the paintings were serene, while others were abstract, but all of them reflected the creativity of the MIT community.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://orgchart.mit.edu/chancellor">Office of the Chancellor</a> and <a href="http://mindhandheart.mit.edu/">MindHandHeart</a> sponsored a Paint Nite&nbsp;for MIT graduate students on&nbsp;Aug.&nbsp;22&nbsp;at <a href="https://studentlife.mit.edu/dining/retail-dining/thirsty-ear-pub">The Thirsty Ear Pub</a>. Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart and MindHandHeart Executive Administrator Maryanne Kirkbride provided opening remarks, informing students of their offices’ programs and services, such as the <a href="http://studentlife.mit.edu/arm">Accessing Resources Coalition</a>, the&nbsp;<a href="https://mobi.mit.edu/student/index">MIT Student Support Hub</a>, and the&nbsp;<a href="http://mindhandheart.mit.edu/innovation-fund">MindHandHeart Innovation Fund</a>.</p>
<p>While the students enjoyed hors d'oeuvres and refreshments, a local art instructor led them in painting a tree against a sky background. The sold-out event was organized by the <a href="http://gsc.mit.edu/committees/activities/">Graduate Student Council Activities Committee</a>, and spearheaded by graduate students Shaiyan Keshvari, Mukund Gupta, and Xueying Zhao.</p>
<p>The student organizers were motivated to establish Paint Nites&nbsp;to provide their peers with an opportunity to unwind in a community setting.</p>
<p>“We love the space at The Thirsty and want to use it as much as possible,” Keshvari said. “I thought about what activities we could do that are fun, easy to run, and absolutely stress-free for participants. I’d heard about Paint Nites from a friend, and I thought we should try it out here.”</p>
<p>The first in a series of Paint Nites, the event appeared to be a success. “Some people are absorbed in their painting, some people are socializing, and it seems like everyone is having a good time, which was the goal,” said Keshvari.</p>
<p>Zhao added:&nbsp;“I think most MIT grad students are scientists and engineers, and this will help them to realize that they can also be artists. Everyone’s life needs some art and painting can be de-stressing. It’s not a competition and no one is judging your work — it’s just enjoyable.”</p>
<p>Graduate student Nicole Moody said of her painting: “It has sort-of evolved into a willow tree. When I was making the leaves some of the paint dripped down, so it looks like a fall scene. I’m here with four of my friends and we plan to hang our paintings along the staircase of our residence, so we can see our nice trees and remember this fun activity.”</p>
<p>Upcoming Paint Nites will be sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor, the Office of Graduate Education, Community Wellness at MIT Medical, the International Students Office, and the Atlas Service Center.</p>
Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart (right) poses with Paint Nite organizers Shaiyan Keshvari (left) and Xueying Zhao.Photo: Maisie O'BrienMindHandHeart, Community, Arts, Student life, Graduate, postdoctoral, Special events and guest speakersMIT team digitizes historic sanctuary of Machu Picchuhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-team-digitizes-machu-picchu-peru-0828
What if we could immerse ourselves in this UNESCO World Heritage Site through virtual reality or use augmented reality to interact with its 3-D site map?Tue, 28 Aug 2018 15:00:00 -0400Eduardo Rivera | Lily Keyes | MISTIhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-team-digitizes-machu-picchu-peru-0828<p>For many&nbsp;people, the Inca city of Machu Picchu in the Andes of Peru is one of the most recognizable icons of archaeological and adventure tourism in the world. However, for the Peruvian people and for the international scientific community, Machu Picchu is much more than a tourist destination. In addition to being a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, the historic sanctuary has great cultural and economic importance for Peru and the region of Cusco.</p>
<p>The first references to&nbsp;attempts to document the city of Machu Picchu date back to the late 19th century, when Peruvian and European explorers toured the rugged mountains around the meandering Urubamba River. Some of the explorers did not hesitate to register their visit in the rock. On a wall of the Temple of the Three Windows, Agustin Lizarraga recorded, "July 14, 1902".</p>
<p>But it was Yale University Professor Hiram Bingham who extensively documented the site during his expedition in 1911, and made known to the international community the existence of the lost ruins of the Incas. Over&nbsp;the last 100 years, dozens of archaeological expeditions have contributed to increasing the architectural value and interest in the site, as well as the scientific knowledge of the extraordinary technologies developed by the Incas.</p>
<p>In order to digitally document and develop the foundations for future research, a laboratory team from the MIT Department of Architecture, led by Professor Takehiko Nagakura and PhD student Paloma Gonzalez, has been working on the MISTI Global Seed Fund Machu Picchu Design Heritage project&nbsp;since 2016.</p>
<p>The team, the Architecture Representation and Computation Group, has led the first extensive expedition to digitally document Machu Picchu, using the latest generation of instruments and techniques to explore the site’s architectural and urban importance&nbsp; and develop a 3-D site map using&nbsp;virtual reality and augmented reality. The Architecture Representation and Computation Group has an important record of working with digital capturing technologies on World Heritage Sites in Italy, China, Singapore, and Japan.</p>
<p>"We believe that documentation through computational techniques for the digitalization of architectural monuments is key to the preservation of the cultural heritage of humanity," Nagakura says.&nbsp;“But it is just a simple idea for old practice. From Renaissance time, architects have been going to building sites, and drawing them up to study them. We are just replacing tape measures and Mylar sheets with scanning tools and VR headsets.”</p>
<p>For the project in Peru, the team visited the archaeological complex on two occasions for several weeks in mid-2017 and early 2018. At the site, more than 9,000 images were collected through panoramic cameras, photogrammetric scanning tools, and drones. Gonzalez says the working hours were “intense.”</p>
<p>“We had to reach the archaeological monument before the arrival of the tourists and stay after the closure of the monument," she&nbsp;says.&nbsp;“The great commitment and joint work of the MIT team and the San Antonio Abad del Cusco University, supported by the Decentralized Directorate of Culture of Cusco, made the work fruitful and rewarding.”</p>
<p>Based on the photogrammetric data they sampled, the team&nbsp;developed 3-D models and are working on creating virtual reality experiences that would allow people to immerse themselves in Machu Picchu from anywhere on the planet. The same 3-D models are also being deployed to make a new interactive map of Machu Picchu that superimposes the photographic 3-D view of the site through augmented reality.</p>
<p>Last December, the team launched the <a href="http://cat2.mit.edu/design_heritage/catalog/Project.php?dbase=dh_rv&amp;proj_id=31">MIT Design Heritage Platform</a>, where visitors&nbsp;can see and explore part of the work they have done. In addition, they plan to make this platform a tool to collect images from those who can contribute to the data bank through crowdsourcing.</p>
<p>The project has also managed to document the architectural characteristics and construction materials of the city with high-resolution photographic techniques. The&nbsp;images constitute a unique database with rich information on aspects such as landscape and vegetation at the time the photographs were taken. The team will make all of the information collected available to the authorities of the archaeological monument.</p>
<p>At the same time, they expect that other disciplines can use the databases and photogrammetric models they are developing. The documentation has already been used in conservation efforts, including in the reconstruction of Wiñay Wayna, an archeological site located on the Inca Trail leading to Machu Picchu that was destroyed by a recent flood storm.</p>
<p>Fernando Astete, anthropologist and head of the National Archaeological Park of Machu Picchu, says:&nbsp;"We are very excited with the MIT team work. We welcome all efforts to research and preserve Machu Picchu. We have to protect our heritage for the next generations.”</p>
<p>Architect Cesar Medina, responsible for the digitization of the national park, believes that the collaboration with MIT has been enriching.</p>
<p>“We have been working in 3-D documentation since 2013, but the collaboration with the MIT team lead by Professor Nagakura, with the support of our local university, has allowed us to exhaustively document Machu Picchu, making use of the latest technologies and innovative techniques,” Medina says. “Moreover, we have had the opportunity to visit and know the work of his lab; we see with great interest to continue working in the future with MIT.”</p>
<p>The Architecture Representation and Computation Group is already in conversation with institutions of higher education and heritage conservation of Peru to continue advancing the project of digital inheritance. In addition to continuing in Machu Picchu, they may extend the documentation areas to other archaeological sites of Peru. The project has also opened the doors to possible interdisciplinary collaborations with materials science researchers, urban planners, hydrologist, engineers, archaeologists, and historians.</p>
<p>The MIT students and research assistants who participated in this project were: Diego Cornejo, Paloma Gonzalez, Takuro Kikuchi, Woong Ki Sung, Chang Liu, Eytan Mann, Wenzhe Peng, Rachelle Villalon, Nikolaos Vlavianos, Xu Zhang.</p>
<p>The Machu Picchu Design Heritage project was made possible thanks to the MISTI Global Seed Funds. MISTI is a part of the Center for International Studies within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). The project was also sponsored by the Council of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation&nbsp;of Peru, with the support of the National University of Saint Anthony the Abbot in Cuzco and the Decentralized Directorate of Culture of Cusco.</p>
Left to right: Paloma Gonzalez, Associate Professor Takehiko Nagakura, Chang Liu, and Wenzhe Peng pose with a panoramic view of Machu Picchu in Peru. They are part of an MIT team that has worked to digitally document the site.Photo courtesy of MISTIArchitecture, History, Research, 3-D, Latin America, Augmented and virtual reality, School of Architecture and Planning, MISTI, School of Humanities Arts and Social SciencesWhat Paris shows us about the history of photography https://news.mit.edu/2018/book-catherine-clark-paris-history-photography-0816
MIT professor’s book develops a new narrative about photography and the ways we use it, from the place where it all began.Thu, 16 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/book-catherine-clark-paris-history-photography-0816<p>Imagine a photo of Paris you’ve seen before, whether it’s the Eiffel Tower or an urchin carrying a baguette. Have you ever considered the story behind that picture — why it was taken, and why it’s in circulation today?</p>
<p>If you haven’t, MIT scholar Catherine Clark certainly has. Clark, an associate professor of French studies in MIT’s Global Studies and Languages section, has looked at tens of thousands of photos of Paris over the years. Now, in a new book, Clark takes a deep look at history told through photographs of Paris itself — as a way of understanding how photography’s influence on our historical imaginations has changed since its 19th-century origins.</p>
<p>After all, Paris is where Louis Daguerre unveiled his “daguerreotype” method of photo-making in 1839, and people have been training their cameras on the city ever since. At first, many Parisians were simply documenting their city. In the 20th century, however, Parisian photography became more self-conscious. Many World War II photos of Paris, for instance, are staged images meant to burnish the idea of French resistance, accurately or not.</p>
<p>“Looking at old photographs has its own history,” Clark says. “The book traces the ways in which that evolves — how people’s ideas about what the photograph will do, and do for the study of history, changes.”</p>
<p>Clark’s book, “Paris and the Cliché of History,” is being published this week by Oxford University Press. The title plays on the world “cliché,” which in French also refers to the glass plates that used to serve as photographic negatives in the early days of the medium, as well metal printing plates that combined images and type.</p>
<p><strong>At first: Copying the world</strong></p>
<p>In Clark’s account, Paris has seen at least five distinct historical phases during which the purpose of photographing the city evolved.</p>
<p>The first occurred around 1860, as Paris went through a radical physical transformation led by Georges-Eugene Haussmann, who created the scheme of grand boulevards and clear urban geometry that now defines much of the city. While demolishing much of the old Paris, however, Haussmann sought to chronicle it through the city’s official photographer, Charles Marville. Over time, the city’s Musée Carnavalet also served as a focal point for this kind of effort, acquiring a huge collection of Paris images.</p>
<p>“Part of rebuilding Paris to be an imperial capital and seat of power was preserving its history,” Clark explains.</p>
<p>At this stage, she notes, photography was often straightforwardly documentary, as a medium, replacing paintings and prints as our essential visual representation of the world.</p>
<p>“There were debates in the 19th century about what photos were going to be used for — for science, for art, but also, for people running historical institutions,” Clark notes. “The first thing they’re doing is just cataloging objects. Photographs were imagined as a one-to-one copy of something in the world.”</p>
<p>That changed. A second and distinct phase of Paris’ photographic history, Clark thinks, set in by the 1920s. Photos now became objects of nostalgia for the French, who were dealing with the trauma of World War I, when France suffered millions of casualties and the global order spun out of control.</p>
<p>“It’s this major moment of social upheaval, not just because a lot of people died, but because the world seemed to crumble,” Clark said. “People felt there was a rupture, and they could never go back to what existed before, except now, they could see what the past looked like, because they had photographs. And so a new paradigm arises from that, where photographs are fragments of lost time. And that’s a really powerful way to think about photographs.”</p>
<p><strong>Paris at war: Creating historical narratives</strong></p>
<p>War also produced a third distinct phase of photography in Paris, in Clark’s account — World War II, often depicted through images of seemingly heroic Parisian resistance fighters in moments of dramatic action. But as Clark notes, many such photos were plainly staged. Consider one photo she analyzes in the book, in which three French citizens look through a window, with one aiming a rifle outside. It is almost certainly not a glimpse of real fighting — the men in the picture are too exposed and neatly arranged.</p>
<p>Or take some photos showing ordinary Parisians at barricades in the streets — which would have been a futile tactic in the face of German tanks. But a barricade is a historical trope signifying resistance. To some degree, then, the people in these Parisian photos were “demonstrating political allegiances and performing a certain type of wartime action,” Clark says. “Militarily, the liberation of Paris doesn’t matter that much, but in terms of what it symbolizes, it really matters.”</p>
<p>Moreover, in such resistance photos, we see a familiar process at work, in which people are self-consciously thinking about how the images will be viewed in the future.</p>
<p>“The way in which [the war] was going to be remembered was already being performed on the ground,” Clark says. “It’s not like things happen, and then we create historical narratives about them. We’re already creating historical narratives as we act. These photos published in newspapers, magazines, and books are often in turn the way people learn about such events.”</p>
<p><strong>Plus ça change</strong></p>
<p>Clark believes there are at least two other notable moments when Parisian photography evolved in significant ways. One came in the run-up to city-wide celebrations, in 1951, of Paris’ 2,000th anniversary. Around this time, she observes, Paris photos became more oriented around ordinary people — working-class men, women, and children in everyday life.</p>
<p>“The problem in Paris in 1950 and 1951 is that the city doesn’t look grand,” Clark says. “It’s kind of falling apart in a lot of places. So what do you do when the city doesn’t look great, but you know that it is great? You create narratives about other types of greatness. And I think that’s one reason for this nostalgia for the Parisian working classes in 1950.”</p>
<p>A rather different burst of Parisian photography occurred around 1970s, Clark notes, in the form of a city-sanctioned amateur photography contest that produced 100,000 images of the city. (Clark estimates she has looked at about 15,000 of them.) Here too, Paris officials were trying to capture the city at a moment of physical change, but letting the people do it.</p>
<p>“It’s a great echo for this 1860 moment,” Clark says. “Paris is being modernized again, highways, cars along the banks of the Seine, new high-rises, this feeling of needing to capture what’s being destroyed. [And] in the 1970s, there’s a real sense that the best people to photograph the city would be people who love the city and believe in it. There’s just so much diversity, so many ways of seeing the city in there.”</p>
<p>In the bigger historical picture, Clark thinks, Paris is, on the one hand, ideally suited to an analysis of its photographic self-image — yet hardly the only place where this type of study can be performed.</p>
<p>“The French think of photography as their own invention, and there is a national heritage element to it,” Clark says. “There’s a powerful archival impulse in France … and the historical institutions in Paris are some of the earliest.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, Clark notes, her study is about how photography shaped the historical imagination, and the general concept that Parisian photographic history changed at moment of dramatic historical upheaval may well apply to other cities, too.</p>
<p>“I would love to see someone do a similar study in other places,” Clark says. “After all, in 1839, photography was given to the world by the French government, but the rest of the world made it their own.”</p>
Catherine Clark and the cover of "Paris and the Cliché of History"Global Studies and Languages, France, Books and authors, Social sciences, History, Cities, Photography, Faculty, School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, ArtsDesign tool reveals a product’s many possible performance tradeoffs https://news.mit.edu/2018/interactive-design-tool-product-performance-tradeoffs-0815
Users can quickly visualize designs that optimize multiple parameters at once.Wed, 15 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0400Rob Matheson | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/interactive-design-tool-product-performance-tradeoffs-0815<p>MIT researchers have developed a tool that makes it much easier and more efficient to explore the many compromises that come with designing new products.</p>
<p>Designing any product — from complex car parts down to workaday objects such as wrenches and lamp stands — is a balancing act with conflicting performance tradeoffs. Making something lightweight, for instance, may compromise its durability.</p>
<p>To navigate these tradeoffs, engineers use computer-aided design (CAD) programs to iteratively modify design parameters — say, height, length, and radius of a product — and simulate the results for performance objectives to meet specific needs, such as weight, balance, and durability.</p>
<p>But these programs require users to modify designs and simulate the results for only one performance objective at a time. As products usually must meet multiple, conflicting performance objectives, this process becomes very time-consuming.</p>
<p>In a paper presented at this week’s SIGGRAPH conference, researchers from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) describe a visualization tool for CAD that, for the first time, lets users instead interactively explore all designs that best fit multiple, often-conflicting performance tradeoffs, in real time.</p>
<p>The tool first calculates optimal designs for three performance objectives in a precomputation step. It then maps all those designs as color-coded patches on a triangular graph. Users can move a cursor in and around the patches to prioritize one performance objective or another. As the cursor moves, 3-D designs appear that are optimized for that exact spot on the graph.</p>
<p>“Now you can explore the landscape of multiple performance compromises efficiently and interactively, which is something that didn’t exist before,” says Adriana Schulz, a CSAIL postdoc and first author on the paper.</p>
<p>Co-authors on the paper are Harrison Wang, a graduate student in mechanical engineering; Eitan Grinspun, an associate professor of computer science at Columbia University; Justin Solomon, an assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science; and Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science.</p>
<p>The new work builds off a tool, InstantCAD, <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2017/reshaping-computer-aided-design-instantcad-0724">developed last year</a> by Schulz, Matusik, Grinspun, and other researchers. That tool let users interactively modify product designs and get real-time information on performance. The researchers estimated that tool could reduce the time of some steps in designing complex products to seconds or minutes, instead of hours.</p>
<p>However, a user still had to explore all designs to find one that satisfied all performance tradeoffs, which was time-consuming. This new tool represents “an inverse,” Schulz says: “We’re directly editing the performance space and providing real-time feedback on the designs that give you the best performance. A product may have 100 design parameters … but we really only care about how it behaves in the physical world.”</p>
<p>In the new paper, the researchers home in on a critical aspect of performance called the “Pareto front,” a set of designs optimized for all given performance objectives, where any design change that improves one objective worsens another objective. This front is usually represented in CAD and other software as a point cloud (dozens or hundreds of dots in a multidimensional graph), where each point is a separate design. For instance, one point may represent a wrench optimized for greater torque and less mass, while a nearby point will represent a design with slightly less torque, but more mass.</p>
<p>Engineers laboriously modify designs in CAD to find these Pareto-optimized designs, using a fair amount of guesswork. Then they use the front’s visual representation as a guideline to find a product that meets a specific performance, considering the various compromises.</p>
<p>The researchers’ tool, instead, rapidly finds the entire Pareto front and turns it into an interactive map. Inputted into the model is a product with design parameters, and information about how those parameters correspond to specific performance objectives.</p>
<p>The model first quickly uncovers one design on the Pareto front. Then, it uses some approximation calculations to discover tiny variations in that design. After doing that a few times, it captures all designs on the Pareto front. Those designs are mapped as colored patches on a triangular graph, where each patch represents one Pareto-optimal design, surrounded by its slight variations. Each edge of the graph is labeled with a separate performance objective based on the input data.</p>
<p>In their paper, the researchers tested their tool on various products, including a wrench, bike frame component, and brake hub, each with three or four design parameters, as well as a standing lamp with 21 design parameters.</p>
<p>With the lamp, for example, all 21 parameters relate to the thickness of the lamp’s base, height and orientation of its stand, and length and orientation of three elbowed beams attached to the top that hold the light bulbs. The system generated designs and variations corresponding to more than 50 colored patches reflecting a combination of three performance objectives: focal distance, stability, and mass. Placing the cursor on a patch closer to, say, focal distance and stability generates a design with a taller, straighter stand and longer beams oriented for balance. Moving the cursor farther from focal distance and toward mass and stability generates a design with thicker base and a shorter stand and beams, tilted at different angles.</p>
<p>Some designs change quite dramatically around the same region of performance tradeoffs and even within the same cluster. This is important from an engineer’s perspective, Schulz says. “You’re finding two designs that, even though they’re very different, they behave in similar ways,” she says. Engineers can use that information “to find designs that are actually better to meet specific use cases.”</p>
<p>“This work is an important contribution to interactive design of functional real-world objects,” says Takeo Igarashi, a professor of computer science at the University of Tokyo, and an expert in graphic design. Existing computational design tools, Igarashi says, make it difficult for designers to explore design trade-offs. “The tools work as black box and allow no or limited user control,” he says. “This work explicitly addresses this not-yet-tackled important problem. … [It] builds on a solid technical foundation, and the ideas and techniques in this paper will influence the design of design tools in the future.”</p>
<p>The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army Research Office, the Skoltech-MIT Next Generation Program, and the National Science Foundation.</p>
CSAIL researchers have developed a visualization tool for CAD that, for the first time, lets users instead interactively explore all designs that best fit multiple, often-conflicting performance tradeoffs, in real time.Courtesy of the researchersResearch, Design, Manufacturing, Algorithms, Computer science and technology, Software, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), School of Engineering, National Science Foundation (NSF)Mass timber: Thinking big about sustainable constructionhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mass-timber-sustainable-construction-0807
MIT class designs a prototype building to demonstrate that even huge buildings can be built primarily with wood.Mon, 06 Aug 2018 23:59:59 -0400David L. Chandler | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mass-timber-sustainable-construction-0807<p>The construction and operation of all kinds of buildings uses vast amounts of energy and natural resources. Researchers around the world have therefore been seeking ways to make buildings more efficient and less dependent on emissions-intensive materials.</p>
<p>Now, a project developed through an MIT class has come up with a highly energy-efficient design for a large community building that uses one of the world’s oldest construction materials. For this structure, called “the Longhouse,” massive timbers made of conventional lumber would be laminated together like a kind of supersized plywood.</p>
<p>The design will be presented this October at the Maine Mass Timber Conference, which is dedicated to exploring new uses of this material, which can be used to build safe, sound high-rise buildings, if building codes permit them.</p>
<p>John Klein, a research scientist in MIT’s architecture department who taught a workshop called Mass Timber Design that came up with the new design, explains that “in North America, we have an abundance of forest resources, and a lot of it is overgrown. There’s an effort to find ways to use forest products sustainably, and the forests are actively undergoing thinning processes to prevent forest fires and beetle infestations.”</p>
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<p>People tend to think of wood as a suitable material for structures just a few stories high, but not for larger structures, Klein says. But already some builders are beginning to use mass timber products (a term that basically applies to any wood products much larger than conventional lumber) for bigger structures, including medium-rise buildings of up to 20 stories. Even taller buildings should ultimately be practical with this technology, he says. One of the largest mass timber buildings in the U.S. is the new 82,000-square-foot John W. Olver Design Building at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.</p>
<p>One of the first questions people raise when they hear of such construction has to do with fire. Can such tall wooden structures really be safe? In fact, Klein says, tests have demonstrated that mass timber structures can resist fire as well or better than steel. That’s because wood exposed to fire naturally produces a layer of char, which is highly insulating and can protect the bulk of the wood for more than two hours. Steel, in contrast, can fail suddenly when heat softens it and causes it to buckle.</p>
<p>Klein explains that this natural fire resistance makes sense when you think about dropping a lit match onto a pile of wood shavings, versus dropping it onto a log. The shavings will burst into flames, but on the log a match will simply sputter out. The greater the bulk of the wood, the better it resists ignition.</p>
<p>The structure designed by the class uses massive beams made from layers of wood veneers laminated together, a process known as laminated veneer lumber (LVL), made into panels 50 feet long, 10 feet wide, and more than 6 inches thick These are cut to size and used to make a series of large arches, 40 feet tall to the central peak and spanning 50 feet across, made of sections with a triangular cross-section to add structural strength. A series of these arches is assembled to create a large enclosed space with no need for internal structural supports. The pleated design of the roof is designed to accommodate solar panels and windows for natural lighting and passive solar heating.</p>
<p>“The structural depth achieved by building up the triangular section helps us achieve the clear span desired for the communal space, all while lending a visual language on both the interior and the exterior of the structure,” says Demi Fang, an MIT architecture graduate student who was part of the design team. “Each arch tapers and widens along its length, because not every point along the arch will be subject to the same magnitude of forces, and this varying cross-section depth both expresses structural performance while encouraging materials savings,” she says.</p>
<p>The arches would be factory-built in sections, and then bolted together on site to make the complete building. Because the building would be largely prefabricated, the actual on-site construction process would be greatly streamlined, Klein says.</p>
<p>“The Longhouse is a multifunctional building, designed to accommodate a range of event scenarios from co-working, exercise classes, social mixers, exhibitions, dinner gatherings and lectures,” Klein says, adding that it builds on a long tradition of such communal structures in cultures around the world. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Whereas the production of concrete, used in most of the world’s large buildings, involves large releases of greenhouse gases from the baking of limestone, construction using mass timber has the opposite effect, Klein says. While concrete adds to the world’s burden of greenhouse gases, timber actually lessens it, because the carbon removed from the air while trees grow is essentially sequestered for as long as the building lasts. “The building is a carbon sink,” he says.</p>
<p>One obstacle to greater use of mass timber for large structures is in current U.S. building codes, Klein says, which limit the use of structural wood to residential buildings up to five stories, or commercial buildings up to six stories. But recent construction of much taller timber buildings in Europe, Australia, and Canada — including an 18-story timber building in British Columbia — should help to establish such buildings’ safety and lead to the needed code changes, he says.</p>
<p>Steve Marshall, an assistant director of cooperative forestry with the U.S. Forest Service, who was not involved in this project, says “Longhouse is a wonderfully creative and beautifully executed example of the design potential for mass timber.” He adds that “mass timber is poised to become a significant part of how America builds. The sustainability implications for the places we live, work, and play are huge. In addition to the well-known ramifications such as the sequestration of carbon within the buildings, there are also community benefits such as dramatically reduced truck traffic during the construction process.”</p>
<p>The Longhouse design was developed by a cross-disciplinary team in 4.S13 (Mass Timber Design), a design workshop in MIT’s architecture department that explores the future of sustainable buildings. The team included John Fechtel, Paul Short, Demi Fang, Andrew Brose, Hyerin Lee, and Alexandre Beaudouin-Mackay. It was supported by the Department of Architecture, BuroHappold Engineering and Nova Concepts.</p>
View of the Longhouse Northwest ElevationImage: MIT Mass Timber DesignResearch, Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, Classes and programs, Sustainability, Emissions, Cities, EnergyInventing future fabricshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/inventing-future-fabrics-affoa-mit-fit-workshop-0731
Advanced Functional Fabrics of America workshop challenges pioneering MIT and FIT students to conceive new ideas.
Tue, 31 Jul 2018 12:45:01 -0400Materials Research Laboratoryhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/inventing-future-fabrics-affoa-mit-fit-workshop-0731<p>A T-shirt that can change color to complement your mood (and help you pare down your wardrobe). An apron that transforms into a dress and has interchangeable pockets with high-tech functionality. These are the forward-looking concepts presented by a group of three students from MIT and three students from the Fashion Institute of Technology (<a dir="ltr" href="https://www.fitnyc.edu/index.php" rel="noopener" target="_blank">FIT</a>), making practical use of the latest active textile technologies.</p>
<p>For the first FIT/MIT Summer Workshop, held over two weeks in June, the six students spent one week at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts and one week at FIT in New York City to explore and develop clothing concepts using advanced functional materials that incorporate 3-D printing or advanced knitting technologies. The workshop was held collaboratively with Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (<a dir="ltr" href="http://go.affoa.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">AFFOA</a>), a Cambridge-based national nonprofit enabling a manufacturing-based transformation of traditional fibers, yarns, and textiles into highly sophisticated integrated and networked devices and systems.</p>
<p><strong>Personal identity</strong></p>
<p>Veronica Apsan, of Park Ridge, New Jersey, a 2018 FIT graduate who majored in fashion design, and Erika Anderson of Carlsbad, California, a rising MIT senior who is studying mechanical engineering with a minor in design, conceived a T-shirt that can change color.</p>
<p>“We were really interested in color and how it affects people’s moods and how they feel,” said Anderson. “Color and clothing are part of a person’s identity and how they want to portray that to the world.” Anderson and Apsan started with a color-changing filament that they 3D-printed into modular components. From there, they moved on to hollow fibers that can be filled with an ink that changes color when an electrical current is sent through it.</p>
<p>“Many people own basic clothing or similar shirts and pants in different colors,” Anderson explained. “This takes up a lot of closet space and costs a lot of money.” A large wardrobe is also not environmentally friendly. With a T-shirt that can change color, a person could radically pare down how many garments they buy and throw out.</p>
<p>The four other students in the workshop combined their ideas into a single wearable concept. David Merchan, of Bow, New Hampshire, a rising MIT senior double majoring in materials science and engineering and physics; Melanie Wong of Queens, New York, a rising senior at FIT majoring in fashion design; Calvin Zhong '18, of Manhattan, a recent MIT graduate who double majored in architecture and comparative media studies; and Jesse Doherty, an FIT rising senior majoring in fashion design, created a double-layer knit laboratory apron with reflective zippers that transforms into a dress or bag and has interchangeable pockets with customizable technological functions. For example, one pocket could have an energy socket that wirelessly charges a phone, while another could act as a hand sanitizer by working into the fiber antimicrobial chemicals or ultraviolet LEDs. The apron/dress itself could also be infused with conductive fibers that cool or warm the wearer.</p>
<p>“You could imagine that a lab tech would have different needs than a doctor, who would have different needs than a DIY hobbyist or a shop manager,” explained Zhong.</p>
<p><strong>3-D-printed mesh</strong></p>
<p>Using 3-D printing, the students knit an open, fully twistable weave mesh for their apron/dress. Once the soluble supports were removed in a chemical bath, the mesh moved in every direction because of the flexible fiber. “The same structure in different materials would behave differently,” noted Doherty.</p>
<p>In addition to conceiving their projects, the students had a packed schedule of workshops, talks, and site visits. While at MIT, they learned about bringing their ideas to market through an intensive entrepreneurship boot camp. They also attended an AFFOA member networking event at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where Apsan said she and Anderson received positive feedback about their ideas. “The fact that someone in the industry who is working on textiles is thinking the same thing was so awesome to hear,” she said. During their week at FIT, the students visited WGSN, a leading fashion trend, forecast, and analysis service, and met with Gabi Asfour, founder and creative director at threeASFOUR, a clothing design brand, about incorporating 3-D-printed parts into garments. MIT and FIT faculty mentors assisted the students throughout the two weeks.</p>
<p>“We believe this is the future, so we want you all to be involved and help make it happen,” AFFOA Chief Executive Officer Yoel Fink told the group.</p>
<p><strong>Inspiring collaboration</strong></p>
<p><a dir="ltr" href="https://cheme.mit.edu/profile/gregory-rutledge/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Gregory C. Rutledge</a>, lead principal investigator for MIT in AFFOA and the Lammot du Pont Professor in Chemical Engineering, commented, "It is exciting to see what happens when students from different fields of engineering and design, but with a common interest in advanced fibers and fabrics, come together and engage with new kinds of materials and manufacturing techniques. The collaboration and creativity is inspiring.”</p>
<p>“Combining the talents and skills of FIT and MIT is truly the future,” said Apsan as the two-week workshop wrapped up.</p>
<p>“This workshop validates the benefits of bringing FIT and MIT students together. For this specific workshop, the students explored the possibilities of advanced knitting and 3-D printing,” said Joanne Arbuckle, deputy to the president for industry partnerships and collaborative programs at FIT. “As the fashion industry becomes more and more dependent on advanced textiles, students who have the experience this workshop has provided will prove to be the industry’s next leaders.”</p>
Advanced Fiber workshop participants compare the differences between weft knit and warp knit for sweater construction at FIT in New York City. Pictured (clockwise from left) are Veronica Apsan, Melanie Wong, Jesse Doherty, Erika Anderson, Sebastian Pattinson, David Merchan, and Calvin Zhong. Photo: Smiljana PerosMaterials Science and Engineering, Mechanical engineering, Design, Materials Research Laboratory, Collaboration, WorkshopsJ. Meejin Yoon named dean of Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/j-meejin-yoon-named-dean-cornell-college-architecture-art-and-planning-0724
Tue, 24 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0400School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/j-meejin-yoon-named-dean-cornell-college-architecture-art-and-planning-0724<p>J. Meejin Yoon, professor and head of the Department of Architecture at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, has been appointed the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the <a href="https://aap.cornell.edu/" target="_blank">College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University</a>. She will <a href="http://www.howeleryoon.com/meejin_yoon_named_dean_cornell_aap.php" target="_blank">take up this new position</a> on January 1, 2019. Andrew Scott, professor of architecture and urbanism, currently associate head of the department, has agreed serve as interim head starting August 15.</p>
<p>An architect, designer, and educator, Yoon joined the MIT faculty as assistant professor in 2001 and became department head in 2014. She is founding principal, with Eric Höweler, of <a href="http://www.howeleryoon.com/" target="_blank">Höweler + Yoon</a> Architecture, a multidisciplinary architecture and design studio that has garnered international recognition for a wide range of built work.</p>
<p>Yoon’s designs have embraced technologies at multiple scales, from interactive wearables and landscapes to robotic fabrication of stone structures. Her pioneering interactive installation project for the Athens Olympics, White Noise White Light, was reinstalled on MIT’s campus for MIT President Susan Hockfield’s inauguration in 2005.</p>
<p>Eleven years later, Yoon was asked to design the Sean Collier Memorial at MIT to honor MIT police officer Sean Collier, killed in the line of duty. The memorial is an open vaulted stone structure at the corner of Vassar and Main Streets.</p>
<p>Among her current design projects are the Memorial for Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, the future MIT Museum in Kendall Square, planned to open in 2020, and a 20-story multifamily residential tower in downtown Boston.</p>
<p>“Beyond her excellence and renown as a designer, educator, and administrator, Meejin brings rigor and dedication to everything she touches,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. “Cornell is lucky to have her, to have her back, as we have been for the past 17 years. We will watch Cornell under her leadership with anticipation and with admiration.”</p>
<p>While leading the department, Yoon’s accomplishments included the establishment of a design minor open to all MIT undergraduates; the relaunch of the bachelor of science in art and design; and an increase in cross-disciplinary studios within the graduate program. In 2013, she received the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. Her popular course&nbsp;4.110 / MAS.650 (<a href="https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/spring-2018-4110" target="_blank">Design Across Scales and Disciplines</a>), co-taught with Neri Oxman, explores the relationships among science, technology, and design.</p>
<p>Yoon received a bachelor of architecture degree from Cornell and a master’s in architecture in urban design from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She traveled to Korea under a Fulbright Fellowship after completing her studies.</p>
<p>Her design work, often operating at the intersection of architecture, technology, and public space, has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and the National Art Center in Japan.</p>
<p>She is the author of “Expanded Practice: Projects by Höweler + Yoon and MY Studio” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009); “Public Works: Unsolicited Small Projects for the Big Dig” (MAP Book Publishers, 2008); and “Absence,” a World Trade Center Memorial artist book (Printed Matter and the Whitney Museum of Art, 2003).</p>
<p>Yoon’s research, teaching, and design work has been widely recognized for innovation and interdisciplinary reach, with honors including the 2016 ACADIA Teaching Award, the 2015 New Generation Design Leadership Award from Architectural Record, the Audi Urban Futures Award in 2012, the United States Artist Award in Architecture and Design in 2008, Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard Award in 2007, the Architecture League’s Emerging Voices Award in 2007, and the Rome Prize in Design in 2005.</p>
<p>“MIT’s ethos and commitment to applied knowledge for a better world has had a profound impact on me as an educator and as a designer,” says Yoon. “Design is an instrument for imagining and implementing change — social, cultural, technological, and environmental. During my time at MIT, it has been a privilege to work with such exceptional students and colleagues with these shared values. I look forward to the new challenges ahead and to advancing the principles I have learned here.”</p>
J. Meejin YoonPhoto: Andy RyanFaculty, Architecture, Arts, Design, School of Architecture and PlanningSmart office enables a personalized workplace atmospherehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-media-lab-smart-office-mediated-atmospheres-0713
Project out of the MIT Media Lab uses biosensors and machine learning to optimize the sensory experience in individual work environments.Fri, 13 Jul 2018 10:10:00 -0400Janine Liberty | MIT Media Labhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-media-lab-smart-office-mediated-atmospheres-0713<p>The atmosphere of a given space — the light, sounds, and sensorial qualities that make it distinct from other spaces — has a marked, quantifiable effect on the experiences of the people who inhabit those spaces. Mood, behavior, creativity, sleep, and health are all directly impacted by one’s immediate surroundings.</p>
<p>In the workplace, atmosphere can influence productivity and relationships, as well as overall employee satisfaction and retention. Recent studies have identified a decline in workplace satisfaction — particularly in the knowledge economy, where distraction and disengagement can cost billions of dollars in lost productivity and employee turnover.</p>
<p>Mediated Atmosphere, a project by the Responsive Environments group at the MIT Media Lab, seeks to improve both wellbeing and productivity in the workplace by improving the workplace atmosphere at an individual level. Using modular, real-time control infrastructure with biosignal sensors, controllable lighting, projection, and sound, Mediated Atmosphere creates immersive environments designed to help users focus, de-stress, and work comfortably.</p>
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<p><strong>Smart office&nbsp;with biosensors and machine learning</strong></p>
<p>With the boom of internet of things technologies over the last few years, then-master’s student Nan Zhao noticed that the many lighting solutions, wireless speakers, and home automation platforms on the market lacked a multimodal quality: They weren't synchronizing light, sound, images, fragrances, and thermal control in a meaningful way. Also missing in most available smart&nbsp;home and office products is a basis in physiology — platforms that incorporate research on the impact of atmospheric scenes on cognition and behavior. For this project, Zhao drew on existing research showing the positive effects of natural views and sounds on mental state, as well as the effects of light and sound on mood, alertness, and memory.</p>
<p>In the course of this research, however, Zhao kept coming to the same conclusion: “It’s not one size fits all.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>“People need a place that is fascinating, that gives them a feeling of being away, and is rich but predictable,” she says. “However, this place is different for different people. With our approach, we want to create a personalized experience.”</p>
<p>Comprising a frameless screen (designed with a special aspect ratio so it doesn’t feel like watching TV), a custom lighting network, a speaker array, video projection, and both wearable and contact-free biosignal sensors, Mediated Atmosphere synchronizes and controls numerous modalities.</p>
<p>Zhao and her collaborators also developed a new approach for controlling the system: a control map that compresses a complex set of input parameters to a simplified map-like representation. The compass points&nbsp;of the&nbsp;map are abstract control dimensions, such as focus or restoration. That&nbsp;way, rather than worrying about light levels or sound sources, users can simply tell the system what they want based on how focused or relaxed they want to be. The biosignal sensor stream computes a focus and restoration indicator based on measures developed and evaluated by Zhao and her team. Using these indicators, Mediated Atmosphere can label what specific atmospheric scenes mean for the user, and learn how to automatically trigger changes based on a user’s actual responses and activities.</p>
<p><strong>Customized workspace</strong></p>
<p>The smart office concept is designed to self-regulate on the basis of the user’s activities and physiology. Using biosignal sensors to track heart-rate variability and facial expressions, the prototype both responds to the user’s moods in real time and tracks responses. A <a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3090096" target="_blank">user study</a> published in <em>Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies</em> in June 2017 found that the Mediated Atmosphere smart office prototype had a positive effect on occupants’ perceptions and physiological responses.</p>
<p>“We imagine a workspace that, when asked, can instantly trade the engaging focus of a library with the liberating sensation of a stroll through the forest,” explains Zhao, the first author on the paper. “We want to create an environment player&nbsp;that can recommend or automate your space similar to how Spotify or Pandora gives you access to a world of music. We want to help people to manage their day by giving them the right place at the right time.”</p>
<p>The study of 29 users offered five different ambient scenes, ranging from forest streams to bustling coffee shops, measuring how the environment influenced participants' ability to focus and restore from stress. A second study with nine subjects and 33 scenes, published in Zhao’s thesis, looked at how well the user interface worked in applications where the choice of environments was driven by sensors. In future iterations, Zhao hopes to give users the ability to record their own personal favorite places and upload them into the system, in addition to the built-in options.</p>
<p>Zhao is working with a number of industry experts to hone both the technology and the experiential effectiveness of Mediated Atmosphere. Media Lab alumna Susanne Seitinger, a lighting expert at Philips, worked with Zhao on the lighting installation. Steelcase has advised Zhao on designing for workplaces. International Flavors and Fragrances, a Media Lab member company, is supporting the team’s efforts to add an olfactory display into the latest prototype. Most recently, member company Bose has been supporting the work and helping to take the prototype to the next level —&nbsp;the next iteration will be a modular system that can be installed in any existing workspace so Zhao’s team can conduct experiments on this technology in the wild.</p>
<p>Lee Zamir, director of the BOSEbuild team, is enthusiastic about Mediated Atmosphere’s potential to help redefine the workspace.</p>
<p>“The Mediated Atmosphere project has the potential to improve and rethink the work environment,” he says. “We go to work not just to make a living, but to be challenged, to accomplish, to focus, and to connect with others to achieve great things. When we are able to do this, when we have a ‘good day at work,’ it improves all the other parts of our lives. We carry that sense of purpose and progress from our workday with us.”</p>
<p>In addition to the next phase of research in office environments, Zhao is also creating a smaller, modular system that could be installed in any office or even in a home office. The team is exploring more sensory modality such as thermal control, air flow, and scent.</p>
<p><strong>Future office</strong></p>
<p>Zhao envisions a future office where employees’ workstations come equipped with Mediated Atmosphere platforms, but the concept is a long way from being ready to market or scale. One major challenge is to measure impact reliably during real work scenarios without burdening the user; to that end, Zhao is developing a contact-free sensor system to remove the wearable component. Another difficulty is creating customizable installations that fit into different sizes and types of office spaces, allowing colleagues to each have their own Mediated Atmosphere workstation without disrupting one another. The team is collecting data and doing image-based analysis using machine learning tools to address this challenge.</p>
<p>But perhaps the challenge Zhao takes most seriously is that of adding real value.</p>
<p>“The same technology that can create a memorable, wonderful, stimulating experience can also create an irritating, elevator-music type of experience,” she says. “It takes artistic intuition and empathy to create the former. That is also why personalization is so important.”</p>
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An atmospheric scene, called "Forest," with video from thesilentwatcher.com, is part of the Mediated Atmospheres project by Nan Zhao.Image courtesy of Nan Zhao.Media Lab, Artificial intelligence, internet of things, Machine learning, Research, Technology and society, School of Architecture and Planning, Arts, DesignA solution for urban storm floodinghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/storm-flooding-engineered-urban-green-space-0713
Engineered green spaces can capture and purify stormwater while delivering ecosystem and recreational benefits, MIT researchers report.Thu, 12 Jul 2018 23:59:59 -0400Greta Friar | Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Labhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/storm-flooding-engineered-urban-green-space-0713<p>Flooding, on the rise due to climate change, can devastate urban areas and result in drawn-out, costly repairs. Cities are in dire need of new strategies to manage the influx of stormwater. An interdisciplinary team of engineers and urban planners at MIT has now developed a solution: multifunctional urban stormwater wetlands and ponds that seamlessly integrate the control and cleaning of stormwater with ecological and recreational benefits.</p>
<p>Stormwater flooding in cities is exacerbated by urban infrastructure, as many of the natural ecosystems that would absorb rainfall have been replaced with pavement, which greatly limits an area’s infiltration capacity. This keeps stormwater on the surface, where it picks up all kinds of pollutants — trash, heavy metals, industrial chemicals — that are eventually carried into nearby bodies of water, often including the local water supply.</p>
<p>Many cities do not have adequate systems in place to handle stormwater runoff, the largest single cause of stream impairment in urban areas. Stormwater treatment plants are large investments that need to be integrated into existing drainage and water treatment systems. Without spaces or processes that can sequester and purify contaminated water before it reenters circulation or the natural environment, urban centers lose fresh water that could be available for drinking and groundwater recharge, among other ecosystem needs.</p>
<p>Natural stormwater management systems — engineered green spaces — are becoming more popular options for cities, in part due to their affordability. The MIT team’s wetlands have been designed to be much more effective than existing designs, such as simple basins and serpentines, at controlling water circulation and purifying stormwater, while also delivering ecosystem and recreational benefits.</p>
<p>The MIT team has released the details of their study in a freely available report, "<a href="http://lcau.mit.edu/project/strategies-urban-stormwater-wetlands" target="_blank">Design Guidelines for Urban Stormwater Wetlands</a>," in the hope that cities will adopt this approach. The report is based on two years of research funded by a <a href="https://jwafs.mit.edu/research/projects/current#seedgrant">seed grant</a> from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) and further supported by the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. These guidelines are based on physical experiments undertaken in the MIT Nepf Environmental Fluid Mechanics Lab and <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925857418300582?via%3Dihub" target="_blank">recently published</a> in the journal <em>Ecological Engineering</em>.</p>
<p>“The goal of our study is to help cities mitigate their own problems in the face of rapidly changing climates, large storms, and a lack of economically feasible solutions,” says co-author Alan M. Berger, the Norman B. and Muriel Leventhal Professor of Advanced Urbanism and LCAU co-director. Berger and his co-authors welcome interested city representatives to reach out to them to discuss how to implement their designs. In May, the group conducted an outreach campaign to ensure that these open-sourced designs reach urban stakeholders such as government officials and regional planners across the U.S.</p>
<p>The guidelines combine engineering, urban planning, and landscape architecture expertise to design a versatile green space. On top of managing stormwater, the wetland or pond creates greenery for the city, recreational space for the community, and valuable wildlife habitats.</p>
<p>The designs, which feature a series of clustered islands, are modular and scalable, so they can be tailored to fit the needs and resources of varying urban settings. The work was developed with two specific case studies, Houston and Los Angeles, to help ensure the adaptability of the guidelines to different localities.</p>
<p>“We picked L.A. and Houston because they are both large cities in warm climates, rapidly growing, mostly suburban, with good prospects for green space,” says lead researcher and lead author Celina Balderas Guzmán ’07, MCP ’13, SM ’13. “Moreover, one is very dry and one is very wet. We wanted to show our design’s adaptability to different conditions.” Balderas Guzmán, then an LCAU member and now at the University of California at Berkeley, is an alum of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, where she developed a master's thesis on stormwater wetlands that eventually led to this collaborative, interdisciplinary project.</p>
<p>The guidelines have yet to be used in practice. However the team is currently in contact with city leaders in several locations about the prospect of building a pilot wetland systems. Unaffiliated members of the research community speak positively about the merit of the guidelines. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“As far as I know, there is nothing available to the practitioner community that translates research findings from engineers and landscape architects into reality so cleanly,” says David L. Sedlak, professor of environmental engineering at UC Berkeley and co-director of the Berkeley Water Center.</p>
<p>To develop the guidelines, researchers in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Lab led by Heidi Nepf, the MIT Donald and Martha Harleman Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, tested more than 30 different wetland system designs. They monitored water circulation through sculpted models to determine which topography was most effective in slowing down the stormwater and evenly distributing its flow, in order to best enable the natural processes that cleanse the water of pollutants. This comprehensive testing strategy led to designs based on clusters of streamlined islands placed close together near the wetland inlets.</p>
<p>Controlling the water’s movement so it lingers in the wetland is crucial to give the ecosystem time to improve water quality. Wetlands purify water through a combination of biological and chemical processes, including giving contaminants time to settle out of the water. Wetland vegetation is another good filter, as plant surfaces and the biofilms they support are very effective at capturing pollutants and excess nutrients.</p>
<p>Determining the most effective design for stormwater treatment was a key aspect of the project, but the team emphasizes that the value of their wetland system is more than its water management functionality. Collaboration between engineers and urban planners led to a design that maximized efficiency without sacrificing aesthetic, ecological, or recreational quality.</p>
<p>“Stormwater management guidelines are typically written by engineers and they are very prescriptive. They are not traditionally designed to promote ecology or facilitate recreation,” Balderas Guzmán says.</p>
<p>The team was able to create multifaceted wetland system designs thanks to its unique interdisciplinary makeup. Nepf, co-author of the study, says the engineers contributed hydraulic function innovations while the landscape architects envisioned how to make the wetland a valued part of the fabric of the city.</p>
<p>Sparking interdisciplinary collaborations is a goal of J-WAFS seed grants, and Nepf credits J-WAFS with helping the engineers and urban planners to work together, bridging their different design processes and “different languages.”</p>
<p>“J-WAFS provided a place where we could learn how to talk to each other,” Nepf says.</p>
<p>Because of this unique collaboration, the guidelines offer a rich variety of benefits. They include recreational trails, which bridge the island clusters and connect city streets to inviting green space. The largest islands can hold event spaces for public programming, while floodplains beside the wetland can be used as sports fields, picnic areas, or playgrounds. The islands provide multiple ecological habitat zones, from dry upland to shallow and then deeper water. This habitat could be especially valuable to wetland species as natural wetlands disappear.</p>
<p>The multiuse designs have a political advantage as well. They can help cities win public approval to implement stormwater wetlands, which have often proved to be challenging projects to get local residents to support. Communities unaware of the extent to which stormwater pollutes their water supply may not support using a space that could be a park or a playground for such a project. The addition of recreational features makes artificial wetlands an easier sell.</p>
<p>“I hope these guidelines open people’s eyes to how they can multipurpose land in urban areas,” Nepf says. “I hope we make them think, ‘Okay, I need something to deal with stormwater runoff, so how do I make something that might also benefit the environment and the livability of the city.’”</p>
A rendering of Los Angeles depicts green space and wetlands as envisioned by the MIT team.Image: Jonah SusskindResearch, Civil and environmental engineering, School of Engineering, Environment, Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS), Water, School of Architecture and Planning, Cities, Urban studies and planning, Architecture, Climate change, Flooding, J-WAFSCooling buildings worldwidehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-researchers-energy-efficient-systems-cooling-buildings-worldwide-0711
Analysis points the way to energy-efficient systems that take a location-specific approach to cooling and dehumidifying places where people live and work.Wed, 11 Jul 2018 16:30:00 -0400Nancy W. Stauffer | MIT Energy Initiativehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-researchers-energy-efficient-systems-cooling-buildings-worldwide-0711<p>About 40 percent of all the energy consumed by buildings worldwide is used for space heating and cooling. With the warming climate as well as growing populations and rising standards of living — especially in hot, humid regions of the developing world — the level of cooling and dehumidification needed to ensure comfort and protect human health is predicted to rise precipitously, pushing up global energy demand.</p>
<p>Much discussion is now focusing on replacing the greenhouse gases frequently used as refrigerants in today’s air conditioners. But another pressing concern is&nbsp;that most existing systems are extremely energy-inefficient.</p>
<p>“The main reason they’re inefficient is that they have two tasks to perform,” says&nbsp;<a href="http://energy.mit.edu/profile/leslie-norford/">Leslie Norford</a>, the George Macomber (1948) Professor in Construction Management in the Department of Architecture. “They need to lower temperature and remove moisture, and doing both those things together takes a lot of extra energy.”</p>
<p>The standard approach to dehumidification is to run cold water through pipes inside a building space. If that water is colder than the dew-point temperature, water vapor in the air will condense on the outer surfaces of the pipes. (Think of water droplets beading up on a cold soda can on a hot, humid day.) In an air conditioning system, that water may drop off outside or,&nbsp;in a large-scale system serving a building, be gathered into a collection pan.</p>
<p>The problem is that running a chiller to get water that cold takes a lot of electricity — and the water is far colder than needed to lower the temperature in the room. Separating the two functions brings energy savings on two fronts. Removing moisture from outdoor air brought into the building requires cold water but far less of it than is needed to remove heat from occupied areas. With that job done, running cool (not cold) water through pipes in the ceiling or floor will maintain a comfortable temperature.</p>
<p>A decade ago, Norford and his colleagues at the <a href="http://www.masdar.ac.ae/">Masdar Institute</a>&nbsp;in Abu Dhabi confirmed the energy benefits of maintaining comfortable temperatures using cool-water pipes in the room — especially when indoor spaces are pre-cooled at night, when electricity is cheap and the outside air is cool. But the dehumidification process remained inefficient. Condensing water vapor is inherently energy-intensive, so the researchers needed to find another way to remove humidity.</p>
<p><strong>Borrowing from desalination systems</strong></p>
<p>Two years ago, a promising alternative was brought to Norford’s attention by&nbsp;<a href="http://energy.mit.edu/profile/john-lienhard/">John Lienhard</a>, MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering. Lienhard&nbsp;is&nbsp;Norford’s colleague at the Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling, a research group at the&nbsp;<a href="http://smart.mit.edu/">Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology</a>. Lienhard was working on energy-efficient technologies for desalination. Boiling seawater to precipitate the salt is very energy-intensive, so Lienhard’s group was looking instead at using semipermeable&nbsp;membranes that let water molecules through but stop salt ions. Norford thought a similar membrane could be designed that allows water vapor molecules to pass through so they can be separated from other, larger molecules that make up the indoor air.</p>
<p>That concept became the subject of a project undertaken by two mechanical engineering graduate students: Tianyi Chen, who was working with Norford on the impacts of outdoor airflows on building energy performance, and Omar Labban, who was collaborating with Lienhard on using membranes in desalination systems. The students met in an advanced energy conversion class taught by&nbsp;<a href="http://energy.mit.edu/profile/ahmed-ghoniem/">Ahmed Ghoniem</a>, the Ronald C. Crane (’72) Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Paired up for a class project, they identified air conditioning as a topic that would draw on their respective areas of research interest and use their newly acquired expertise in thermodynamic modeling and analysis.</p>
<p>Their first task was to develop a thermodynamic model of the fundamental processes involved in air conditioning. Using that model, they calculated the theoretical least work&nbsp;needed to achieve dehumidification and cooling. They could then calculate the so-called second-law efficiency of a given technology, that is, the ratio of the theoretical minimum to its actual energy consumption. Using that metric as a benchmark, they could&nbsp;perform a systematic, consistent comparison of various designs in different climates.</p>
<p>As an industrial benchmark for comparison, they used&nbsp;coefficient of performance (COP), a metric that shows how many units of cooling are provided for each unit of input electricity. The COP is used by today’s manufacturers, so it could show how different designs might perform relative to current equipment. For reference, Norford cites the COP of commercially available systems as ranging from 5 to 7. “But manufacturers are constantly coming up with better equipment, so the goalposts for competitors are continually moving,” he says.</p>
<p>Norford’s earlier research had shown that cool-water pipes in the ceiling or floor can efficiently handle indoor cooling loads — that is, the heat coming from people, computers, sunlight, and so on. The researchers therefore focused on removing heat and moisture from outdoor air&nbsp;brought in for ventilation.</p>
<p>They started by examining the performance of a commercially available air conditioner that uses&nbsp;the standard vapor compression system (VCS) that has been used for the past century. Their analysis quantified the inefficiency of not separating temperature and humidity control. Further, it pinpointed a major source of that inefficiency:&nbsp;the condensation process. Their results showed that the system was least efficient in cool, humid conditions and improved as conditions got hotter and drier. But at its best, it used five to 10 times more energy than the theoretical minimum required. Thus, there was significant opportunity for improvement.</p>
<p><strong>Membranes and desiccants</strong></p>
<p>To explore the use of membrane technology, the researchers began with a simple system incorporating a single membrane-containing unit. Outdoor air enters the unit, and a vacuum pump pulls the water vapor in it across the membrane. The pump then raises the pressure to ambient levels so the water vapor becomes liquid water before being ejected from the system. The no-longer-humid outdoor air passes from the membrane unit through a conventional cooling coil and enters the indoor space, providing fresh air for ventilation and pushing some warmer, humid exhaust air outdoors.</p>
<p>According to their analysis, the system performs best in relatively dry conditions, but even then it achieves a COP of only 1.3 — not high enough to compete with a current system. The problem is that running the vacuum pump with high compression ratios consumes a lot of energy.</p>
<p>To help cool the incoming air stream, the researchers tried adding a heat exchanger to transfer heat from the warm incoming air to the cool exhaust air and a condenser to turn water vapor captured by the membrane unit into cool water for the cooling coil. Those changes pushed the COP up to 2.4 — better but not high enough.</p>
<p>The researchers next considered options using desiccants, materials that have a strong tendency to adsorb water and are often packed with consumer products to keep them dry. In air conditioning systems, a desiccant coating is typically mounted on a wheel that’s positioned between the incoming and exhaust airflows. As the wheel rotates, a portion of the desiccant first passes through the incoming air and adsorbs moisture from it. It then passes through the heated exhaust air, which dries it so it’s ready to adsorb more moisture on its next pass through the incoming air.</p>
<p>The researchers began by analyzing several systems incorporating a desiccant wheel, but the gains in COP were limited. They next tried using the desiccant and membrane technologies together. In this design, a desiccant wheel, a membrane moisture exchanger, and a heat exchanger all transfer moisture and heat from the incoming air to the exhaust air. A cooling coil further cools the incoming air before it’s delivered to the indoor space. A heat pump warms the exhaust air, which then passes through the desiccant to dry and regenerate it for continued use.</p>
<p>This complicated “hybrid” system yields a COP of 4 under a wide range of temperatures and humidity. But that’s still not high enough to compete.</p>
<p><strong>Two-membrane system</strong></p>
<p>The researchers then tried a novel system that omits the desiccant wheel but includes two membrane units, yielding a design that’s relatively simple but more speculative than the others. The key new concept&nbsp;involved&nbsp;the fate of the water vapor in the incoming air stream.</p>
<p>In this system, a&nbsp;vacuum pump pulls&nbsp;the water vapor through a membrane—now called membrane unit 1. But the captured water vapor is then pushed across the membrane in unit 2 and joins the exhaust air stream — without ever turning into liquid water. In this arrangement, the vacuum pump only has to ensure that the vapor pressure is higher on the upstream side of membrane 2 than it is on the downstream side so that the water vapor is pushed through. There’s no need for raising the pressure to ambient levels, which would condense the water vapor, so running the vacuum pump takes less work. That novel approach results in a COP that can reach as high as 10 and achieves a COP of 9 at many combinations of temperature and humidity.</p>
<p><strong>Different options for different cities</strong></p>
<p>For most of the systems analyzed, performance varies at different combinations of ambient temperature and humidity level. To investigate the practical impact of that variability, the researchers examined how selected systems would perform in four cities with different climates. In each case, the analysis assumed an average summertime outdoor temperature and relative humidity.</p>
<p>In general, the systems they considered outperformed the conventional VCS operating at COPs consistent with current practice. For example, in Dubai (representing a tropical desert climate), using the hybrid membrane-desiccant system could reduce energy consumption by as much as 30 percent relative to the standard VCS. In Las Vegas (a subtropical arid climate), where humidity is lower, a desiccant-based system (without the membrane) is the most efficient option, potentially also bringing a 30 percent reduction.</p>
<p>In New York (a subtropical humid climate), all the designs look good, but the desiccant-based system does best with a 70 percent reduction in overall energy consumption. And in Singapore (a tropical oceanic climate), the desiccant system and the combined membrane-desiccant system do equally well, with a potential savings of as much as 40 percent — and given the costs of the two options, the desiccant-alone system emerges as the top choice.</p>
<p>Taken together, the researchers’ findings provide two key messages for achieving more efficient indoor cooling worldwide. First, using membranes and desiccants can push up air conditioner efficiency, but the real performance gains come when such technologies are incorporated into carefully designed and integrated systems. And second, the local climate and the availability of resources — both energy and water — are critical factors to consider when deciding what air conditioning system will deliver the best performance in a given area of the world.</p>
<p><em>This article appears in the&nbsp;<a href="http://energy.mit.edu/energy-futures/spring-2018/" target="_blank">Spring 2018</a>&nbsp;issue of&nbsp;</em>Energy Futures,<em>&nbsp;the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative.</em></p>
An MIT team performing fundamental studies of systems for cooling and dehumidifying indoor spaces includes (l-r): Professor Leslie Norford, graduate students Tianyi Chen and Omar Labban, and Professor John Lienhard. Chen and Labban began the work when they teamed up for an assignment in an advanced energy conversion class taught by Professor Ahmed Ghoniem (not pictured).Photo: Stuart DarschMIT Energy Initiative, Research, Energy, School of Engineering, Sustainability, Environment, Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, Mechanical engineering, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART)Dennis Frenchman named head of the MIT Center for Real Estatehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/dennis-frenchman-named-head-mit-center-real-estate-0702
Architect and urban designer brings to the role decades of global expertise on the transformation of citiesMon, 02 Jul 2018 11:05:01 -0400School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/dennis-frenchman-named-head-mit-center-real-estate-0702<p>Dennis Frenchman, the Class of 1922 Professor of Urban Design and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been named the new faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE). He assumed the role on July 1.</p>
<p>“We are very excited to have Dennis take on this role,” said Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “He brings to CRE seasoned leadership skills and bold ideas that will expand the frontiers of research and innovation, strengthen the link between urban design and development, and broaden the international reach of the center.”</p>
<p>Frenchman, who serves on the CRE and DUSP faculties, holds dual master’s degrees in architecture and city planning from MIT, where he has taught since 1983. A registered architect, he has a distinguished record of award-winning practice in Boston, most recently as senior principal of <a href="https://tekumafrenchman.com/" target="_blank">Tekuma Frenchman Urban Design</a>, working on large-scale development projects in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. His practice and research focuses on the transformation of cities, and he is an expert with worldwide experience in the application of digital technology to city design.</p>
<p>Frenchman has led MIT research efforts for the Energy Foundation to develop new models for clean energy urbanization in China. He has played a leading role in the design and development of innovation districts around the world, from Medellín, Colombia, to Seoul, South Korea. And he is part of an interdisciplinary team from MIT engaged in research <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/autonomous-fleet-amsterdam-roboat-0919" target="_self">collaborations with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions</a> (AMS) in the Netherlands, using the city of Amsterdam as a living laboratory and test bed for urban innovation.</p>
<p>At MIT, Frenchman has led key initiatives in design and urbanism for his department and the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P). For 15 years he headed the school’s Joint Program in City Design and Development. From 1987 to 2016, he co-led and taught the “<a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/beijing-studio-celebrates-30-years-0714" target="_self">Beijing Studio</a>,” an urban design program jointly organized by MIT and Tsinghua University that was one of the earliest and longest-running academic engagements between the U.S. and China. Within the Center for Real Estate, Frenchman co-founded the <a href="http://realestateinnovationlab.mit.edu/index.html" target="_blank">Real Estate Innovation Lab</a> in 2016 with professor David Geltner and research scientist Andrea Chegut.</p>
<p>In 2016, Frenchman developed and helped to launch <a href="https://www.designx.mit.edu/" target="_blank">DesignX</a>, the SA+P entrepreneurship accelerator aimed at ventures related to design and the built environment, and serves as its faculty director. He will continue in this role as the program enters its third year, under the leadership of Executive Director Gilad Rosenzweig.</p>
<p>Dennis Frenchman will take over as CRE faculty director from Albert Saiz, an associate professor of urban economics and real estate. Saiz will remain on the faculty of both the CRE and DUSP.</p>
<p>“We thank Albert for an excellent tenure as director during which he greatly improved on the competitiveness of the program, built the center’s capacities in executive and online education, and emphasized social responsibility and sustainability in educating the real estate developers of the future,” said Sarkis.</p>
Dennis Frenchman, the Class of 1922 Professor of Urban Design and Planning, is the newly appointed director of the MIT Center for Real Estate. Photo: Bryce VickmarkFaculty, Center for Real Estate, Urban studies and planning, Cities, Design, Real estate, School of Architecture and PlanningBuilding the greenhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/alumnus-ken-wang-pound-ridge-golf-course-0629
Ken Wang ’71, MIT Corporation member and former MIT Alumni Association president, developed one of America’s premier modern golf courses.Fri, 29 Jun 2018 16:00:01 -0400Jay London | MIT Alumni Associationhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/alumnus-ken-wang-pound-ridge-golf-course-0629<p>MIT has a long connection with the sport of golf, on and off the course. The Institute’s varsity golf program existed from 1902 to 2009 and won at least eight recorded team or tournament championships and included at least 13 individual champions and medalists. And today MIT’s Club Golf Team is a competitive group that is part of the National Collegiate Club Golf Association.</p>
<p>Off the course, <em>MIT Technology Review</em> has attempted to characterize the perfect golf swing; Professor Anette “Peko” Hosoi has chronicled the impact of follow-through; and Professor Pedro Reis has studied how golf ball dimples might improve vehicle efficiency.</p>
<p>One alumnus, however, has truly gotten his hands onto the putting green. Ken Wang ’71, former MIT Alumni Association president who graduated with a degree from MIT's Department of Economics and currently serves on the MIT Corporation, developed one of the most highly regarded public golf courses in the country: the 170-acre Pound Ridge Golf Course, located less than an hour outside New York City.</p>
<p>Wang purchased the Pound Ridge course with his father as a lightly played nine-hole course in 1980, and completely rebuilt it as an 18-hole course in 2008. It’s known today as one of America’s premier public golf courses.</p>
<p>“We bought the course with no grander strategy than to have a place to golf near our family country home,” he says. “But today it’s very rare to find modern courses built near urban cities.”</p>
<p>The 18-hole transformation was the work legendary course architect Pete Dye, who is known for course designs that blend traditional golfing features with unique, thought-provoking twists.</p>
<p>“Pete thinks like a mathematician or engineer,” Wang says. “And he is a kindred spirit to the MIT community. His aw-shucks image notwithstanding, every angle has been figured out — to the nearest decimal. That precision has always appealed to the MIT side of me.”</p>
<p>As in previous years, Wang's course will be the site of this year's annual MIT Alumni Golf Classic.</p>
<p>“Being an MIT alum means more than just being a scientist or engineer,” Wang says. “It’s about connecting with the MIT community and having fun.”</p>
<p><em>The 2018 <a href="http://alumic.mit.edu/s/1314/17form/interior.aspx?sid=1314&amp;gid=13&amp;pgid=42877&amp;content_id=45489" target="_blank">MIT Alumni Golf Classic</a> will take place Tuesday, Sept. 25, at Pound Ridge Golf Club in Pound Ridge, New York. A discounted early bird price for individuals and foursomes is available until July 1. Free coach bus transportation from MIT campus will be available for Boston-area golfers.</em></p>
<p><em>A version of this article first appeared on the <a href="https://alum.mit.edu/slice" target="_blank">Slice of MIT</a> blog.</em></p>
Ken Wang ’71 rebuilt the Pound Ridge Golf Course as an 18-hole course in 2008. Photo courtesy of the MIT Alumni Association. Alumni/ae, Sports and fitness, Architecture, Business and management, Economics, School of Humanities Arts and Social SciencesMIT chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society inducts 77 students from the Class of 2018https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-chapter-phi-beta-kappa-society-inducts-students-0626
Tue, 26 Jun 2018 15:25:01 -0400School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-chapter-phi-beta-kappa-society-inducts-students-0626<p>The Phi Beta Kappa Society, the nation’s oldest academic honor society,&nbsp; invited 77 graduating seniors&nbsp;from the Class of 2018 into the&nbsp;MIT chapter, Xi of Massachusetts.<br />
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Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary, honors the nation’s most outstanding undergraduate students for excellence in the&nbsp;liberal arts, which include&nbsp;the humanities, the arts, sciences, and social sciences. Only 10 percent of higher education institutions have PBK chapters, and fewer than 10 percent of students at those institutions are selected for membership.<br />
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“This year’s inductees have been chosen on the basis of their exceptional academic performance, which has included not just technical subjects but also substantial commitment to the humanities, arts, and social and natural sciences in their purest forms — learning for learning’s sake,” said <a href="https://lit.mit.edu/people/abahr/" target="_blank">Arthur Bahr</a>, an associate professor of literature at MIT and the president of Xi of Massachusetts. “Such an education prepares them to thrive not just in particular careers but also in the broader and more important practice of pursuing reflective, meaningful, and well-lived lives."<br />
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At the induction ceremony, which took place on June 7, <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~awa/Allan_Adams/Home.html" target="_blank">Allan Adams</a>, principal investigator of the Future Oceans Lab at MIT, presented an address entitled, “On the Value of Invisible Things.” Allen discussed his professional transition from a theoretical string physicist to a passionate oceanographic researcher intent on exploring and conserving the world’s oceans. In describing what he’s learned from “lifting the veil” and discovering the vast invisible life hidden within ocean depths, he advised the new inductees to “keep an eye out for invisible things to guide you and drive you.” As Allen observed, “Exploring involves risk — whether in space, your career, or your heart.”<br />
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Bahr, who specializes in medieval literature, provided the inductees and their families with a lively overview of the “ancient … well, relatively ancient" PBK society. With assistance from chapter historian&nbsp;<a href="https://history.mit.edu/people/anne-e-c-mccants" target="_blank">Anne McCants</a>, professor of history, and&nbsp;chapter guardian Elizabeth Vogel Taylor of the Concourse Program and the Department of Chemistry, Bahr introduced the 2018&nbsp;inductees to&nbsp;the rights and responsibilities of PBK members. The 77 inductees were then recognized individually, shown the society’s secret handshake, and signed the register of the Xi of Massachusetts chapter.</p>
Phi Beta Kappa inductee Michael Feffer '18 (center) with members of his family Photo: Jon Sachs / MIT SHASS Communications Alumni/ae, Students, Awards, honors and fellowships, Arts, Humanities, Social sciencesMIT Collaboration with Dar Group supports the future of architecture, planning, and design https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-collaboration-with-dar-group-supports-future-architecture-planning-design-0626
Tue, 26 Jun 2018 13:50:01 -0400MIT Resource Developmenthttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-collaboration-with-dar-group-supports-future-architecture-planning-design-0626<p>MIT and the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) have announced a collaboration with the Dar Group, an international planning, design, and architectural firm led by SA+P Advisory Council member Talal Shair.</p>
<p>The collaboration will support the proposed renovation, recently announced by the Institute, of the historic Metropolitan Storage Warehouse on the MIT main campus as a new location for SA+P. Dar and SA+P will also come together to engage in research on the future of cities and urban areas.</p>
<p>SA+P is consistently ranked as one of the world’s top schools of architecture, planning, and design.&nbsp;It is the home of the&nbsp;first department of architecture in the&nbsp;United States — which this year is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its first graduating class — as well as the oldest continuously running department of urban studies and planning.</p>
<p>“This is a big step into the future for the School of Architecture and Planning,” Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, said of the collaboration, which was marked by a signing ceremony on MIT’s campus earlier in June. “I am very grateful to Mr. Shair and to Dar for helping us realize such a momentous opportunity to elevate the culture of design at MIT and to collaborate on research with the potential to impact urban settings around the globe.”</p>
<p>“We are proud to take part in this collaboration because it reflects many of the ideals and values of the Dar Group,” said Shair. "At Dar, we believe that with sufficient imagination, commitment, and determination, our most ambitious goals are within reach. This project enables us to join with MIT in that spirit and make a lasting contribution to our field, and to the world.”</p>
<p>Built in the late 19th&nbsp;and early 20th&nbsp;centuries, the Metropolitan Warehouse, located at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street, is included in the National Register of Historic Places. The proposed renovations would preserve the structure’s distinctive external features and create 200,000 square feet of state-of-the-art interior spaces including classrooms, studios, workshops, galleries, and an auditorium.&nbsp;A featured part of the renovated building would be a new makerspace headed by Martin Culpepper, a professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and leader of the Institute’s Precision Compliant Systems Laboratory. That space would provide expanded design and fabrication facilities for the MIT community. &nbsp;</p>
<p>The planned new location for SA+P would create a hub for interdisciplinary research and learning&nbsp;in&nbsp;art, architecture, and urban planning&nbsp;at the Institute, with benefits for the entire MIT community. “With this project, we will be able&nbsp;to strengthen even further the human and cultural aspects of an MIT education,” Sarkis noted. “This is an exciting moment for SA+P and MIT.”</p>
MIT President L. Rafael Reif (left) and Talal Shair sign documents related to the collaboration between the Dar Group and MIT. Photo: John GilloolyGiving, Campus buildings and architecture, Architecture, Urban studies and planning, Center for Real Estate, Media Lab, Facilities, Collaboration, education, Education, teaching, academicsIn profile: Jamshied Sharifi ’83, Tony Award winnerhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/in-profile-jamshied-sharifi-tony-award-winner-0615
Composer, musician, and former MIT visiting artist received a 2018 Tony Award for best orchestrations on “The Band&#039;s Visit.”Fri, 15 Jun 2018 16:30:01 -0400Matthew Robinson | Arts at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2018/in-profile-jamshied-sharifi-tony-award-winner-0615<p>While MIT may be best known for its Nobel Prize winners and MacArthur “Geniuses,” on June 10, a Tony Award was added to the mix, thanks to composer Jamshied Sharifi ’83, who orchestrated the music for the record-breaking Broadway hit “<a href="https://thebandsvisitmusical.com/">The Band’s Visit</a><em>.</em>”</p>
<p>Though he admits that some may see an MIT alumnus winning a Tony as “a bit of an oddity,” Sharifi also hopes that it will demonstrate “the breadth of the student body.”</p>
<p>“MIT people excel at math and science,” he observes, following what may be the most common preconception, “but they’re often broad in their interests and abilities. Every time I come to MIT to take part in a musical event I’m amazed at the level of musicianship, musical intelligence, and passion.”</p>
<p>Sharifi credits composer David Yazbek, who wrote the score to “The Band's Visit,” with being his “overall musical guru.”</p>
<p>“I think he wrote a score that perfectly straddles the worlds of Arabic music and Broadway,” Sharifi says, noting that, as orchestrator, he was responsible for arranging Yazbek’s songs for an ensemble, as he has done at MIT and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Despite his demure attitude, Sharifi still sees why he was a good fit for the project.</p>
<p>“As I had a great deal of experience with Middle Eastern music,” he reasons, “it was a natural fit, and the instruments used in the show were and are intimately familiar to me.”</p>
<p>That said, Sharifi sees it as a “huge honor, both to be nominated and to be selected” and expresses appreciation for the many who have stood by and supported the show.</p>
<p>“Although it was clear from nearly the beginning that 'The Band’s Visit' had a lot of critical love,” observes, Sharifi “that doesn’t necessarily translate into awards. So, for the show to be so recognized, especially for an unusual, quiet, understated show such as this one, is very sweet. &nbsp;For me personally, well, it’s still pretty unreal!”</p>
<p><strong>Jazzy Jayhawk</strong></p>
<p>Born in Topeka, Kansas, Sharifi was exposed at an early age to a wide range of international musical forms and styles, thanks to his American-born mother and Iranian-born father.</p>
<p>“I grew up in Kansas City,” Sharifi explains, citing the birthplace of such legends as Charlie Parker, Count Basie, and Pat Metheny as his hometown. “I was able to find good teachers and a community of musicians my age who were interested in jazz and improvised music.”</p>
<p>Sharifi began taking piano lessons with his keyboard-playing mother at the age of 5 and then branched out into guitar and drums at 9 and added flute at 10.</p>
<p>“She always encouraged me,” Sharifi says of his mother, “and also pushed me to study other instruments.”</p>
<p>His ever-expanding repertoire of instruments have helped Sharifi succeed in various parts of the music industry, from composing to conducting and to scoring musicals and films.</p>
<p><strong>From KC to MIT</strong></p>
<p>As his father is a chemist (and also a “huge music fan”), Sharifi was not only “jazz aware” but science aware — and aware, in particular, of a certain school in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>“MIT was on my radar,” he recalls. “I don’t know where I first heard of it, but it was a legendary place where one could get deep into those subjects.”</p>
<p>Though he admits to preferring music to matriculation when he graduated from high school, Sharifi deferred acceptance to MIT and did not enroll until he was urged by high school friend (and eventual fellow MIT student) Shlomo Vile '83, '84.</p>
<p>“Shlomo…had gone ahead,” Sharifi recalls, “and he came home that summer and said I had to go.”</p>
<p><strong>Arts at the Institute</strong></p>
<p>While at MIT, Sharifi was able to pursue his proclivities in both science and the arts and came to see both as great strengths at the school. However, he maintains, the arts programs have continued to expand since he graduated.</p>
<p>“The arts at MIT have become a much bigger part of campus life since I was a student,” he maintains, “and I think now there are many more opportunities for students to find artistic expression than when I attended.”</p>
<p>During his time as a student, Sharifi became involved with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble and got to know its legendary leader Herb Pomeroy.</p>
<p>“I met Herb as a freshman,” he recalls of the former sideman for fellow Sunflower State son Charlie Parker. And while he was not admitted to the ensemble until his junior year, Pomeroy had apparently seen something special in Sharifi. So much so that, upon his retirement, Pomeroy asked Sharifi to take over as conductor of the ensemble. In this capacity, Sharifi continued to compose and perform and helped the band win top honors at the prestigious Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz festival in 1991.</p>
<p>“I think from that point on I’ve been pretty deeply connected to music at MIT,” Sharifi says. He also thanks the current MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble Director Fred Harris, who called upon Sharifi to compose a work in honor of Pomeroy’s 75th birthday, for encouraging the ongoing relationship; a relationship that has seen Sharifi return to arrange for 2017 Grammy-winner Jacob Collier and MIT musicians and to compose for MIT’s Great Clarinet Summit.</p>
<p>“I have the greatest respect for him as a person and musician,” says Harris, calling Sharifi “absolutely first-rate in every regard and a true consummate professional. ... I’m not surprised at all that he won a Tony!”</p>
<p><strong>Keeping score</strong></p>
<p>When he graduated from MIT with a degree in humanities in 1983, Sharifi went across the river to the Berklee College of Music, where he studied jazz piano and composition. It was at Berklee that Sharifi began to show an interest in film scoring.</p>
<p>“I had always felt a draw to film music and the relationship between film and music,” Sharifi says, citing Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” as an early inspiration. Working at Berklee with such scoring stars as Michael Gibbs only encouraged this passion. In a few short years, Sharifi had scored three films and 15 hour-long televisions shows. Among his more notable scores are those for “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muppets_From_Space" style="text-decoration:none;">Muppets From Space</a>,” the Nickelodeon film “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_the_Spy_(film)" style="text-decoration:none;">Harriet the Spy</a>,” “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rugrats_Movie" style="text-decoration:none;">The Rugrats Movie</a>,” and the 1999 remake of “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thomas_Crown_Affair_(1999_film)" style="text-decoration:none;">The Thomas Crown Affair</a>.” This experience also allowed Sharifi to meet other collaborators, eventually leading him to the team that scored “The Band's Visit.”</p>
<p>“My dear friend and frequent collaborator Rob Mathes was the music director of Sting’s 'The Last Ship,'” Sharifi explains, recalling how a scheduling issue encouraged Mathes to call him for help. “On that show I met Dean Sharenow, who … is a longtime friend of 'Band'<em> </em>music supervisor David Yazbek, and he recommended me as an orchestrator.”</p>
<p><strong>Spring “Awakening”</strong></p>
<p>While his Berklee experience emphasized his love for Jazz, Sharifi’s Middle Eastern influences continued to shine through, giving his scores a distinctive sound and feel; one that is enhanced by technological advances he developed at MIT, including a breath-controlled pitch bender on his synthesizer which allows Sharifi to play it like an acoustic instrument.</p>
<p>“I did a lot of listening and transcription of very old — nearly a century old — Arabic recordings,” Sharifi recalls. “This led to a set of original melodies that I drew on.”</p>
<p>The Middle Eastern influences on Sharifi’s life and music came to fullest fruition in 2013, when he was asked by MIT Wind Ensemble Music Director Fred Harris to compose music about the Arab Spring for a concert that was filmed by MIT Video Productions and broadcast by Boston’s PBS affiliate WGBH. The documentary about Sharifi’s composition, “<a href="http://news.mit.edu/2017/documentary-jacob-collier-0906" target="_self">Awakening: Evoking the Arab Spring Through Music</a>,” won a New England Emmy Award.</p>
<p>“It was a terrific synergistic collaboration between the performing arts and media arts at MIT,” noted MIT Video Production Senior Director Lawrence Gallagher.</p>
<p>As the accolades continue to pour in for “Band,” Sharifi is already working on the orchestrations for the musical version of “Monsoon Wedding”<em> </em>by Mira Nair (who, Sharifi notes, studied film at MIT while attending another school down the river) and producing records for Pharaoh’s Daughter and Mirabai Ceiba.</p>
<p>“I’m [also] trying to keep up with my kids Kai and Layla,” he says.</p>
Jamshied Sharifi, winner of the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations for “The Band's Visit”Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Tony Awards ProductionsAwards, honors and fellowships, Alumni/ae, Music, Theater, Arts, School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, ProfileMIT Professor Emerita Joan Jonas receives the 2018 Kyoto Prizehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-professor-emerita-joan-jonas-receives-kyoto-prize-0615
Artist and scholar cited for her “immeasurable impact” in pioneering the integration of performance art and new media.Fri, 15 Jun 2018 09:20:00 -0400School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-professor-emerita-joan-jonas-receives-kyoto-prize-0615<p><a href="http://act.mit.edu/people/professors/joan-jonas/" target="_blank">Joan Jonas</a>, professor emerita in the MIT <a href="http://act.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Program in Art, Culture and Technology</a>, is one of three individuals honored with the 2018 Kyoto Prize.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>The Kyoto Prize is Japan’s highest private award for global achievement, created by Japanese philanthropist Kazuo Inamori and awarded by the Inamori Foundation. As part of the prize,&nbsp;Jonas will receive a diploma, a gold Kyoto Prize medal, and 100 million yen (approximately $915,000) at a ceremony in Kyoto, Japan, on Nov. 10.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“Joan is a giant and she deserves all recognition for a lifetime of superlative achievements,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. “Yet the Kyoto Prize cannot overshadow the work that is to come — the continuously bold, experimental work, the eternally youthful outlook, and her perpetually poetic insights into our world’s problems. Her best work will always be her next work.”</p>
<p>Awarded annually in three categories — Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy — the prize honors individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of humankind. Jonas is this year’s recipient in the Arts and Philosophy category for her lifetime of accomplishment and global influence as an artist.</p>
<p>“Jonas created&nbsp;a new artistic form by integrating performance art and video art, and has&nbsp;evolved her original medium at the forefront of contemporary art continuously,” the prize announcement states. “Creating labyrinth-like works that lead audiences to diverse interpretations, she hands down the legacy of 1960s avant-garde art by developing it into a postmodern framework, profoundly impacting artists of later generations.”</p>
<p><strong>More than 50 years of influence in the arts</strong></p>
<p>Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.</p>
<p>The Inamori Foundation cited “Vertical Roll,” a Jonas piece from 1972 that integrated a performance with its real-time video screened on a TV monitor, as an archetype of the genre and her practice. “This work featured a revolutionary structure of coexistence of a live performance and its represented image,” the foundation stated, “with a discrepancy in time and space between the audience’s viewpoints and camera angles, as well as the effect of electrical delay within the system.”</p>
<p>Jonas received a BA in art history from Mount Holyoke College in 1958, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and received an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. Jonas taught at MIT from 1998 to 2014, and is currently professor emerita in ACT within the School of Architecture and Planning.</p>
<p>The recipient of numerous honors and awards, Jonas represented the United States in the U.S. Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with an installation organized by the&nbsp;<a href="https://listart.mit.edu/" target="_blank">MIT List Visual Arts Center</a>&nbsp;and commissioned by its director, Paul Ha.</p>
<p>“Contemporary art would not be where it is today without Joan Jonas’s trailblazing work in performance and video art,” says Ha. “The Biennale exhibition demonstrates that her extraordinary contribution to the field and her experimental approach to art making continues. We are thrilled to see Joan receive this singular recognition from the Kyoto Prize committee.”</p>
<p>The Biennale installation, entitled “<a href="http://joanjonasvenice2015.com/" target="_blank">They Come to Us Without a Word</a>,” was praised as “a triumph” by Roberta Smith, art critic and writer for <em>The&nbsp;New York Times</em>.</p>
<p>“Performance art is a young person’s sport, most often pursued in heat, often accompanied by sensationalism and abandoned as stamina fades,” Smith wrote in 2015. “But, at 78, Joan Jonas has avoided all of the above, quietly but determinedly elaborating performance into an immersive multimedia art form that has sustained her for more than five decades.”</p>
<p>Jonas has had numerous significant solo exhibitions around the world, including a career retrospective&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/joan-jonas" target="_blank">currently on view in London at the Tate Modern</a>&nbsp;through August 5. Other recent examples include the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (CCA) (2016); Centre for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu Project Gallery in Japan (2014); Kulturhuset Stadsteatern Stockholm (2013); Proyecto Paralelo in Mexico (2013); Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (2013); Bergen Kunsthall in Norway (2011); and Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010). Jonas has been represented in dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany, six times since 1972, and has had major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart in Germany, and the Queens Museum of Art in New York.</p>
<p><strong>2018 Kyoto laureates</strong></p>
<p>Jonas is one of three Kyoto laureates for 2018 in the fields at Arts and Philosophy, Advanced Technology, and Basic Sciences. The honoree for Advanced Technology is Karl Deisseroth, a professor at Stanford University, for his research in optogenetics and the development of causal systems neuroscience. In Basic Sciences, the foundation selected Masaki Kashiwara, a professor at Kyoto University, for his outstanding contributions to a broad spectrum of modern mathematics.</p>
<p>Jonas is the 13th individual from the MIT community, including alumni, to receive the Kyoto Prize. Including this year’s laureates, 108 individuals and one organization have received the honor.</p>
Artist and professor emerita Joan Jonas at MIT in 2014Photo: L. Barry HetheringtonFaculty, Awards, honors and fellowships, Arts, Visual arts, List Visual Arts Center, Art, Art, Culture and Technology, Architecture, School of Architecture and PlanningMetropolitan Storage Warehouse is potential new location for School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/metropolitan-storage-warehouse-school-architecture-planning-0614
Historic building would create “design hub” for MIT, with benefits for surrounding community.Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/metropolitan-storage-warehouse-school-architecture-planning-0614<p>MIT has identified the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse as a potential new location for the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P). The proposed move would let the Institute create a new hub for design research and education, allow the school to expand its full range of activities, and open new spaces for public use.</p>
<p>The building would need renovation, a process that would require approval from the City of Cambridge.</p>
<p>While MIT has previously considered other functions for the landmark building, using it as an interdisciplinary academic center — while expanding the capacities of SA+P’s highly rated programs — could bring about a wide array of benefits for students, faculty, and the larger community.</p>
<p>Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, emphasizes that students, staff, and faculty throughout the Institute would find an intellectual home in the proposed new building.</p>
<p>“It’s about really creating a design hub for MIT on the campus, bringing the expanding and increasingly important areas of design from across MIT — art, architecture, and urban planning — together in one place,” says Sarkis. “Moving does not address just the school’s aspirations, but MIT’s aspirations.”</p>
<p>MIT leaders have voiced their support for the plan, while also noting its benefits for the Institute as a whole.</p>
<p><strong>"</strong>SA+P already has a wonderful spirit and sense of identity; uniting so many elements of the School in a single building will amplify that strength and create a central resource for the whole MIT community,"&nbsp;says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. "In its outward effects, the project is also a perfect fit for the people of SA+P: Who better to revive a grand old building and reknit the streetscape along Mass. Ave. than those who love and understand buildings and cities the most?"</p>
<p>Robert B. Millard, chairman of the Corporation at MIT, also expressed his support for the project.</p>
<p>“I have a long history with and&nbsp;an&nbsp;admiration for the School of Architecture and Planning,&nbsp;and I am delighted that&nbsp;as&nbsp;we celebrate the 150th&nbsp;anniversary of the Department of Architecture,&nbsp;we plan for a future that strengthens both SA+P and MIT,” Millard says.</p>
<p>Among other things, a relocation to the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse could expand MIT’s classroom and design studio space, significantly increase its exhibition capacity for arts and design programming, provide new faculty offices, create a new center for the arts at MIT, and provide new areas for meetings and collaboration-based work. The building would also host public events and activities about cities, and include retail spaces.</p>
<p>“The renovation of the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse is intended to generate new opportunities for research, teaching, and innovation at the Institute,” says Provost Martin A. Schmidt. “I look forward to seeing faculty and students, across many disciplines, use the new space to push their fields into the future.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>A featured part of the renovated building would be a new makerspace headed by Martin Culpepper, a professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and leader of the Institute’s Precision Compliant Systems Laboratory. That space would provide expanded design and fabrication facilities for the MIT community, and let Institute researchers collaborate — physically or virtually — with the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node, which opened in 2017. &nbsp;</p>
<p>In recent years, SA+P has become increasingly involved in collaborations with other schools at MIT. These substantive new areas of collaboration range widely, including the increased incorporation of design principles in engineering — as well as the greater use of data in urban studies, and new connections between architecture, planning, climate science, and engineering. SA+P could host studio-based courses developed with other schools (including the School of Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management) in the renovated space. MIT also approved a new urban science major for undergraduates in 2018, and a design minor, approved in 2016, to fit any existing major.</p>
<p>A new building enhancing interdisciplinary interactions would be “transformational,” Sarkis says.</p>
<p>The possible move would also shift a major space for teaching and research over to the west side of Massachusetts Avenue for the first time, bringing the school into closer proximity with the residential population of the Institute campus.</p>
<p>“We [would be] creating a new gateway for MIT,” says Sarkis, noting that the building has a central location in the overall map of the campus.</p>
<p>The proposal to renovate the historic building includes retail space on the ground floor, and a theater. One of the proposed retail spaces would be a new outlet for the MIT Press, likely focusing on the topics of art, architecture, urbanism, and design.</p>
<p>The possible move would also take advantage of a distinctive situation in which there is room for academic expansion within the existing built environment at MIT.</p>
<p>Construction on the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse began in 1894, although some parts of the current structure date to 1911. The building was designed by the architectural firm Peabody and Stearns, and its brick tower and narrow windows have long drawn comparisons to a castle.</p>
<p>The structure, which MIT owns, is one of the oldest buildings in the campus area — MIT did not move to Cambridge until 1916 — and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The City of Cambridge must approve modifications to the structure due to its historic status. MIT has been in discussion with Cambridge officials about the project.</p>
<p>As one of MIT’s five schools, SA+P encompasses a variety of departments and programs, including the Department of Architecture, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the MIT Media Lab, the Center for Real Estate, the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, and the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.</p>
<p>MIT Media Lab personnel would remain in their current locations. The Media Lab is housed in a two-building complex, and its newest building, on the corner of Ames Street and Amherst Street, just opened in 2010. The project could allow SA+P to create shared resources with the Media Lab, including gallery and performance spaces, and project rooms, while providing a new public portal to the Media Lab.</p>
<p>The proposed redevelopment of the structure would follow other MIT building projects that have been designed for interdisciplinary collaboration while containing flexible spaces. This includes the Stata Center, which houses an array of researchers in disciplines from computer science to linguistics, and the new MIT.nano building, slated for completion this year, which will host a wide range of nanotechnology research.</p>
<p>“Everybody’s looking at it as an opportunity,” Sarkis says. “We can think about how we can do things better together, how we can create new opportunities for teaching and research, and technology and resources and workspaces — together we can re-imagine everything. We’re really looking forward to that.”</p>
MIT has identified the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse as a potential new location for the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P). The proposed move would let the Institute create a new hub for design research and education, allow the school to expand its full range of activities, and open new spaces for public use.Photo: Bryce VickmarkSchool of Architecture and Planning, Architecture, Urban studies and planning, Media Lab, Center for Real Estate, boston, Cambridge, Boston and region, Campus buildings and architecture, Facilities, Collaboration, History of MIT, Arts, MIT Press, School of Humanities Arts and Social SciencesMIT hosts University of Puerto Rico students after Hurricane Mariahttps://news.mit.edu/2018/hosting-university-puerto-rico-students-at-mit-post-hurricane-maria-0611
In the wake of the devastating 2017 hurricane, MIT hosted five Puerto Rican undergraduates to help them continue their path toward graduate school.Mon, 11 Jun 2018 12:50:00 -0400Elizabeth Durant | Office of the Vice Chancellorhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/hosting-university-puerto-rico-students-at-mit-post-hurricane-maria-0611<p>Swanny Lamboy Rodriguez is not one to complain. The University of Puerto Rico (UPR) at Humacao senior, who will begin a doctoral program at MIT this fall, downplays the impact of Hurricane Maria, the historic storm that devastated her country last September.</p>
<p>“It was frustrating not to be able to communicate,” she admits.</p>
<p>Despite experiencing months without power, water, and other essentials, she feels lucky because her family’s home was left fairly intact. By contrast, her campus in Humacao, where she was studying biology, suffered extensive damage. All told, UPR’s 11 campuses sustained millions of dollars in damages from the storm.</p>
<p>Rodriguez resumed her studies at the end of October, but classes were held in tents. For her and many other students, prospects for continuing coursework and conducting research — and for seniors, completing degrees and applying for graduate programs — looked bleak&nbsp;if not impossible.</p>
<p>Then one day&nbsp;she drove to a WiFi hotspot and found an email waiting for her from Mandana Sassanfar, a MIT biology lecturer. It read:&nbsp;“If you get this message, we would like to offer you the opportunity to study here in the spring semester.”</p>
<p>Rodriguez took the offer, as did four other UPR seniors: Angel Astacio-Echevarria, Gabriel Colón-Reyes, Raul Mojica Soto-Albors, and Jean Carlos Vega-Díaz.</p>
<p>Vega-Díaz, an architecture major at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedrasm,&nbsp;had been considering volunteering for clean-up service on the island when he received the good news.</p>
<p>“My entire family cried in disbelief when I received the invitation from MIT,” he says. “I thought, what university would care enough to provide this incredible life-changing opportunity?”</p>
<p><strong>Strengthening ties </strong></p>
<p>That opportunity came about thanks to Sassanfar, who also oversees <a href="https://biology.mit.edu/about/diversity/" target="_blank">diversity and outreach</a>&nbsp;for the departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Gloria Anglón, assistant dean and director of diversity initiatives in the <a href="https://odge.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Office of Graduate Education</a> (OGE), with help from faculty and administrators from across the Institute. Sassanfar and Anglón knew the students already, because all five of them had participated in the 2017 <a href="http://odge.mit.edu/undergraduate/msrp/" target="_blank">MIT Summer Research Program</a> (MSRP).</p>
<p>Founded in 1986, each year MSRP&nbsp;serves about 40 undergraduate students from schools around the U.S. Aimed at underrepresented or underserved students, the program’s mission is to promote the value of graduate education, increase diversity, and prepare and recruit talented scholars for graduate school at MIT. There are currently two distinct programs: one <a href="http://biology.mit.edu/outreach/msrp/" target="_blank">specifically for biology and brain and cognitive sciences</a>, and one <a href="http://odge.mit.edu/undergraduate/msrp/" target="_blank">for all other departments</a>.</p>
<p>Inviting MSRP alumni from Puerto Rico to continue their studies at MIT made perfect sense, says Anglón. “They’ve already spent a summer here doing research, which we knew would help them acclimate more easily to the academic semester,” she says.</p>
<p>Anglón&nbsp;and Sassanfar chose seniors because their prospects for graduate school next year, at MIT or elsewhere, would suffer most if they did not graduate on time. To stay on track, the students took two or three classes and conducted research, which, for some, was a continuation their work during last summer’s MSRP.</p>
<p>After the students arrived in early February, a number of staff in OGE, the Office of the Vice Chancellor, and the Department of Biology provided additional support to ensure a smooth transition. They arranged a special orientation, connected the students with the Association of Puerto Rican Students at MIT, and held regular gatherings with staff and MSRP pod leaders — graduate students who guide and mentor students during the summer program.</p>
<p><strong>Opening doors</strong></p>
<p>Being on campus this spring was an eye-opener for the students. Rodriguez, whose research focused on lung cancer, was amazed at the size of one of her biology classes; she had never had a class with more than 25 people before. Even the modern facilities were a novelty. “I couldn’t believe that those chalkboards could move up and down in 10-250,” she says.</p>
<p>She and her fellow UPR students were also exposed to novel areas of study not available at their home institutions.</p>
<p>“We have no neuroscience research going on at my campus, so it’s a completely new thing to me,” says Raul Mojica Soto-Albors, a UPR at Mayaguez biology major. His work at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research involved characterizing neuron populations in the retrosplenial cortex of mice. Although he has additional coursework to complete at UPR next year, neuroscience has piqued his curiosity and he’s considering pursuing a PhD in the field. “I will totally apply to MIT,” he says.</p>
<p>Vega-Díaz found the architecture program at MIT quite distinct from UPR, where the focus is more on design within the context of spatial relations. MIT, he notes, integrates other parameters, like environmental tools to study the impact of solar power on energy consumption. He worked in the Urban Risk Lab, an interdisciplinary group of designers and researchers that develops ways to incorporate risk reduction and preparedness into urban and regional design.</p>
<p>“My life changed with this research group,” he says. “Since my time at MIT, I have become passionate about being a pioneer in Puerto Rico who can integrate communities into post-disaster reconstruction.” After he graduates this summer, he’ll return to the Urban Risk Lab as a research scientist for a year, while also working on a design portfolio for his graduate school application.</p>
<p><strong>Finding equilibrium</strong></p>
<p>Even during their short time, the visiting students faced a challenge common to many MIT students: balancing coursework, activities, and all of the opportunities to work independently and explore interdisciplinary studies.</p>
<p>“I was used to the work life I had going on at my institution,” says Soto-Albors. “But then coming here there’s so much more that you can do, there’s so many things available that you really have to set up your schedule and have serious time management skills.” On top of classes, he worked in the lab full time, often staying until 7 or 8 p.m. and then heading home to study and work on problem sets. “It was a nice experience particularly because of that,” he says, because it gave him a sense of what life is like as a graduate student.</p>
<p>Moreover, the students had to navigate an abrupt transition to a new culture and location. Rodriguez finished her coursework at UPR on Jan. 31, said a quick goodbye to her family, and hopped on a plane for Boston the next day.</p>
<p>“The most meaningful experience I had here was seeing myself slowly improve in classes after having dragged with me a lot of the indifference, academically speaking, the aftermath of the hurricane had left on me ... while being here, I saw myself improve and I knew that not all was lost.”</p>
<p>Sassanfar says MIT got as much out of the visit as the UPR students did.</p>
<p>“Seeing firsthand how hard the students worked and how much they benefited from this opportunity makes it all so worthwhile,” she says. “Not only does this directly impact diversity here, it also strengthens our existing relationships with faculty in Puerto Rico.”</p>
<p>Blanche Staton, a senior associate dean in OGE, echoes that sentiment.</p>
<p>“We were so pleased to have experienced the new perspective that these students brought to our campus, and are hopeful that they will be among our future graduate students,” she says. “They were clearly excited by their time here and will certainly act as ambassadors for the Institute.”</p>
University of Puerto Rico students visiting MIT this spring were (l-r): Gabriel Colon-Reyes, Angel Astacio-Echevarria, Swanny Lamboy Rodriguez, Raul Mojica Soto-Albors, and Jean Carlos Vega-Diaz.Photo courtesy of the Office of the Vice Chancellor.School of Science, School of Architecture and Planning, School of Engineering, Biology, Brain and cognitive sciences, Architecture, Students, Undergraduates, Community, Global, International initiatives, Vice ChancellorQS ranks MIT the world’s No. 1 university for 2018-19https://news.mit.edu/2018/qs-ranks-mit-worlds-no-1-university-2018-19-0606
Ranked at the top for the seventh straight year, the Institute also places first in 12 of 48 disciplines.Wed, 06 Jun 2018 16:00:00 -0400MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/qs-ranks-mit-worlds-no-1-university-2018-19-0606<p>For the seventh year in a row MIT has topped the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today.</p>
<p>The full 2018-19 rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at <a href="https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings">topuniversities.com</a>. The QS rankings were based on academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students. MIT earned a perfect overall score of 100.</p>
<p>MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-no-1-2018-qs-world-university-rankings-subjects-0228">12 of 48 disciplines ranked by QS</a>, as announced in February of this year.</p>
<p>MIT received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; Linguistics; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering; Chemistry; Materials Science; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>Additional high-ranking MIT subjects include: Art and Design (No. 4), Biological Sciences (No. 2), Earth and Marine Sciences (No. 3), Environmental Sciences (No. 3), Accounting and Finance (No. 2), Business and Management Studies (No. 4), and Economics and Econometrics (No. 2).</p>
Photo: AboveSummit with Christopher HartingRankings, Architecture, Chemical engineering, Chemistry, Civil and environmental engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Economics, Linguistics, Materials Science and Engineering, DMSE, Mechanical engineering, Aeronautical and astronautical engineering, Physics, Business and management, Accounting, Finance, Arts, Design, Mathematics, EAPS, School of Architecture and Planning, School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, School of Science, School of Engineering, Sloan School of ManagementFeatured video: How tiny houses solve a huge problemhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/featured-video-tiny-houses-solve-huge-problem-homelessness-0604
Architecture alumna Sharon Lee MArch &#039;81, MCP &#039;81 thinks small to address Seattle’s growing homelessness crisis.Mon, 04 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/featured-video-tiny-houses-solve-huge-problem-homelessness-0604<div class="cms-placeholder-content-video"></div>
<p>“I&nbsp;believe very strongly that housing is a human right,” says Sharon Lee MArch '81, MCP '81 who is addressing the housing crisis in Seattle, Washington, the city with the third largest homeless population in the country following New York City and Los Angeles. &nbsp;</p>
<p>As founder and executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), Lee has adjusted her strategy in the last few years as homelessness has become rampant. The solution: tiny houses. Tiny houses are a growing trend in the real estate market for those with a minimalist goal, but they’re not just cute, they’re also practical. These tiny houses are eight feet by 12 feet and they include lights, heat, a window, and a door with a lock.</p>
<p><a href="https://lihi.org/tiny-houses/">LIHI’s tiny houses</a>&nbsp;are built, often by local volunteers and students, in areas with open land or unused parking lots and are set up to be their own small community. Each tiny house village — there are seven throughout the city — has some sort of communal kitchen and bathroom facility. Most importantly, since the tiny houses are under 120 square-feet, they aren’t considered a dwelling unit so they can be built and operational quickly.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“If you want to build a building, it takes a year to get financing, a year to get permits, and a year to year-and-a-half to build. In the meantime, people are literally dying on the streets,” says Lee.</p>
<p>According to Lee, there are approximately 11,000 homeless people in Seattle on any given night, which, due to space constraints of shelters, leaves nearly 5,000 completely unsheltered. Over the past two years, nearly 2,000 people have taken advantage of the tiny house communities, built by LIHI with the help of the City of Seattle—they fund the utilities to power the houses and provide social workers and case managers. The houses—meant to be a temporary solution—have proved to be more than a temporary shelter, but also a vehicle for turning their lives around.</p>
<p>“It is very emotional,” says Lee. “When we offer people a tiny house, they may have been on the street for four years and they finally move into a place that's heated and where they can stay and they're just overwhelmed. Then they find that they can get their life together once they're in a tiny house. They can address their health care, their mental health, and their employment situation because they can be stable.”</p>
<p>Over the past two years, more than 300 residents of the tiny house villages moved on to permanent housing and more than 250 gained employment.&nbsp;Throughout her career, Lee has developed more than 4,500 units of affordable housing — providing not just the bricks and mortar, but also a stable environment for families and underserved people.</p>
<p><em>Submitted by: Julie Barr/MIT Alumni Association | Video by: Brielle Domings/MIT Alumni Association | 2 min, 30 sec </em></p>
A house from the tiny house villages in Seattle, thanks to Sharon Lee MArch '81, MCP '81Photo: Brielle Domings Architecture, Featured video, Alumni/ae, Urban studies and planning, Diversity and inclusion, School of Architecture and Planning, CitiesMIT Video Productions nominated for a third Emmyhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-video-productions-nominated-third-emmy-0601
Fri, 01 Jun 2018 14:25:01 -0400Alice McCarthy | MIT Open Learninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-video-productions-nominated-third-emmy-0601<p>For the third time in five years, the <a href="https://mvp.mit.edu/">MIT Video Productions</a> (MVP) team has been nominated for a New England Emmy. This year’s effort, a documentary film featuring <a href="https://mvp.mit.edu/video/imagination-off-the-charts-jacob-collier-comes-to-mit/">the 2016 residency of visiting artist Jacob Collie</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdtK_oiyJAo">r</a>, was produced in collaboration with MIT Music and Theater Arts (MTA). &nbsp;</p>
<p>Since 2011, MIT Video Productions, a unit of MIT Open Learning, has been collaborating with MTA, &nbsp;producing both performance documentaries and concert webcasts. “MIT has a well-known reputation for excellence in engineering, research, and science,” says Lawrence Gallagher, MVP director. “What is now becoming as well-known, is the excellence of our humanities, arts, and social sciences and most certainly, the performing arts. We have been thrilled to shine a light on that excellence.”</p>
<p>In 2013, MVP received their first Emmy nomination (and win) for a performance documentary piece, "<a href="https://mvp.mit.edu/video/awakening-evoking-the-arab-spring-through-music/">Awakening: Evoking the Arab Spring through Music</a>," crafted with the MIT Wind Ensemble and featuring an original composition by&nbsp; Jamshied Sharifi '83. “It was a terrific synergistic collaboration between the performing arts and media arts at MIT,” says Gallagher, adding that the project set the stage for an ongoing musical video collaboration between the two MIT communities.</p>
<p>Four to five times each semester, MVP records and shares concert performances from the Kresge Auditorium to a global audience via webcast. They have collaborated on approximately 30 performances to date, including concerts for the Concert Choir, the Symphony Orchestra, the Jazz Ensemble, the Wind Ensemble, and other MIT musical communities.</p>
<p>Frederick Harris, Jr, director of the MIT Wind and Jazz Ensembles, invited the Grammy Award-winning Collier to MIT and invited a wider group of musicians from the Boston area to perform in the concert. Led by producer/editor Jean Dunoyer ’87, MVP taped lectures, rehearsals, interviews with the artists, and the final live performance to craft a 28-minute performance documentary film. Dunoyer, whose professional credentials include years as a television documentary editor and freelance filmmaker, has worked closely with Harris, who often approaches the MVP team with creative ideas ripe for film production.</p>
<p>“In this piece, we worked together to uncover the intricacies of the creative process, and we witnessed this celebrated artist’s gifts as a music educator," says Dunoyer. “We recognize that art plays an enormous role in the lives of many MIT students and we are always looking for ways to creatively and artistically express it.”</p>
<p>This film is one of six nominated in the arts and entertainment category; the others are productions from broadcast TV stations. “It’s an honor and noteworthy to have a university video production department be recognized this way,” adds Gallagher. “It was an equal honor to bring our talents to bear in crafting stories about these amazing MIT student musicians and scholars.”</p>
<p>The winner of the Arts and Entertainment Emmy will be announced June 2 at the 41st Annual New England Emmy Awards Ceremony in Boston.</p>
“I’ve heard or have been a part of concerts in Kresge for 37 years," says composer Jamshied Sharifi '83 about Jacob Collier's 2016 performance at MIT, "and that night tops them all.” Photo: L. Barry HetheringtonMusic, Arts, Special events and guest speakers, Music and theater arts, Collaboration, Awards, honors and fellowships, Video, School of Humanities Arts and Social SciencesChina Venture Workshop announces first cohorthttps://news.mit.edu/2018/china-venture-workshop-announces-first-cohort-0531
Ten teams will collaborate with local partners, pilot solutions to urban challenges.Thu, 31 May 2018 13:10:01 -0400Louis Goldsmith | School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/china-venture-workshop-announces-first-cohort-0531<p>Ten MIT startups have been selected for the inaugural cohort of the China Venture Workshop, jointly sponsored by the MIT China Future City Lab’s (CFC) China Future City Innovation Connector (FCIC) and DesignX, the School of Architecture and Planning’s accelerator for innovation in the built environment. The startups, with goals ranging from clean energy to job creation, aim to launch ventures in China to solve problems associated with urbanization.</p>
<p>The FCIC prepares teams of innovators to tackle the problems of urbanization by working with those active in the Chinese urban development industry. The program pairs teams from MIT with academic advisors at Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Science, and with leading industry and civic actors, to guide them through a local pilot launch process. The program also provides essential business skills and insights for operating in China, including how to work closely with the government and how to engage customers.</p>
<p>“If we want to solve the challenges of cities in China, as well as around the world, we need innovative companies to deploy solutions on the ground,” says Siqi Zheng, faculty director of the China Future City Lab. Zheng is an urban and environmental economist whose research focuses on Chinese cities.</p>
<p>“China, however, is a hard market to penetrate,” she says. “We offer teams the knowledge, connections, and support to launch successfully in China. The CFC Lab is developing a systematic approach to identifying urban challenges in Chinese cities that are local to each city but that also share some characteristics, and then design procedures to better match the technological and social innovations with those challenges.”</p>
<p>The workshop is a two-week intensive summer program led by faculty and staff from CFC, DesignX, and Tsinghua University, where the program will partly take place. It will introduce entrepreneurial teams to potential investors, resources, and experts in their fields as they turn their ideas and inventions into tangible ventures. The startups will also travel to other Chinese cities that are leaders in innovation to identify potential pilot locations and meet with local leaders and innovators.</p>
<p>“China presents unique opportunities for innovation in design, cities, and the built environment,” says Professor Dennis Frenchman, faculty director of DesignX, who has worked in China for more than 30 years. “We find that cities are willing to experiment with new technologies and patterns of development that will improve urban livability.”</p>
<p>On May 21 the teams met with over 30 of the CFC’s Chinese industrial partners to demonstrate their progress and solicit feedback before they embark on the piloting trip.</p>
<p>“The fact that FCIC teams will have the opportunity to work with influential real estate conglomerates, city governments, and academic researchers in Greater China will provide a significant advantage to these ambitious urban innovation startups,” said CFC’s executive director, Zhengzhen Tan, who designed and developed the FCIC program in cooperation with DesignX and Tsinghua University.</p>
<p>According to Tan, the workshop received 25 applications that featured a wide variety of creative and innovative ideas. FCIC, DesignX, and industry partners evaluated written applications, listened to pitches, and conducted interviews to choose the teams.</p>
<p>Gilad Rosenzweig, executive director of DesignX, has been working with dozens of startups that are making an impact in cities. “This opportunity to engage in modern Chinese city making is unique,” says Rosenzweig. “DesignX was created to help design and deploy ideas and technology to improve design, cities, and the human experience. Partnering with the CFC Lab and Tsinghua University will support exponential growth for everyone involved.”</p>
<p>These are the startups:</p>
<p><strong>AdaViv</strong> uses artificial intelligence to help indoor agriculture companies monitor their crops and make adjustments to growing conditions to optimize results. AdaViv’s founders are particularly interested in China’s expanding herbal medicine market.</p>
<p><strong>Biobot Analytics</strong> deploys robotic sensors in urban sewer systems to help governments collect and evaluate real-time public health data, such as the prevalence of opioids and other drugs. They have completed experiments in the U.S., Kuwait, and South Korea.</p>
<p><strong>CitoryTech</strong> allows individuals to familiarize themselves with their community by employing innovative data to lead residents on outings to explore their cities.</p>
<p><strong>Constructure</strong> matches various construction industry participants to increase transparency between employers and their potential employees.</p>
<p><strong>Gaia Elements</strong> is developing a kite-powered system to generate energy from wind. They are seeking to expand this innovative technology in China, the world’s largest clean energy market.</p>
<p><strong>Kawsay</strong> connects infrastructure providers with people living in informal communities and provides data analysis and tools to help the providers manage business growth, explore new markets, and track impact. Their first project was improving water delivery in Lima, Peru, and the team is now working to expand their data collection and forecasting in larger markets.</p>
<p><strong>Multimer</strong> collects, visualizes, and analyzes geolocated data transmitted by wearable technology to inform human-centered spatial design and decisions. They have previously partnered with the United Nations, Harley-Davidson, and IBM to help the organizations understand how their users, employees, and customers utilize a space.</p>
<p><strong>Roots Studio</strong> digitizes the creative content of traditional artists from remote areas around the world and connects them to the $32-billion global art, interior decor, and design licensing markets.</p>
<p><strong>Shurong Data</strong> provides behavior chain analysis using advanced data collection technologies to initiate and aid smarter real estate development and urban planning.</p>
<p><strong>VThree.AI</strong> uses artificial intelligence to empower smart buildings and smart urban life, focusing initially on the problem of energy waste in cities by monitoring and identifying “top waster” devices and rooms in buildings.</p>
<p>In addition, the MIT teams will be joined in China by six startups associated with Tsinghua University:</p>
<p><strong>Air Faucet System</strong> replaces water used during hand-washing with high-speed air flow, achieving the same cleanliness while cutting water use by 90 percent.</p>
<p><strong>Galloon</strong> extracts and treats moisture from the air, turning it into safe drinking water. They are developing technology for use by both individuals and cities.</p>
<p><strong>LeanFM Technologies</strong> employs artificial intelligence to monitor the status of household and office devices and predict impending mechanical failure.</p>
<p><strong>Linktravel</strong> collects and analyzes commuter data to provide consumers with schedules and help transportation companies improve their efficiency.</p>
<p><strong>Sponge Public Restgardens</strong> uses sponge technology to absorb rainwater for use in public restrooms and nearby artificial ponds, creating both efficient bathrooms and urban beauty.</p>
<p><strong>Zhongyan Parking</strong> increases the efficiency of underground parking by building vertical shafts that can accommodate ten times as many cars as a typical parking lot of the same size.</p>
<p>Zheng, who also serves as the Samuel Tak Lee Associate Professor of Real Estate Development and Entrepreneurship, says that she is optimistic about the positive change that the combination of visionary startups and knowledgeable partners will bring about.</p>
<p>“This program has the potential to help combat the issues of urbanization in China in an innovative and creative manner that could improve people’s urban living experiences,” Zheng says. “Even in only our first year, we think the program is going to have an immediate impact.”</p>
MIT startup teams meet with Chinese industry partners at the China Future City Lab demo day.Photo: Lighten StudioInnovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E), Urban studies and planning, China, Design, Cities, Asia, Global, Real estate, Classes and programs, Development, Startups, School of Architecture and PlanningSpirn, Oxman win Cooper Hewitt design awardshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-anne-spirn-neri-oxman-cooper-hewitt-national-design-awards-0530
School of Architecture and Planning professors receive national recognition for excellence, innovation, and impact through design.Wed, 30 May 2018 11:10:00 -0400School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-anne-spirn-neri-oxman-cooper-hewitt-national-design-awards-0530<p>Two School of Architecture and Planning professors are among 10 honorees for the 2018 National Design Awards from Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum. The awards recognize excellence, innovation, and public impact in design across multiple categories.</p>
<p>Professor Anne Whiston Spirn of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning received the Design Mind award. Neri Oxman, associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, was recognized with the Interaction Design award.</p>
<p>“We are thrilled to have two faculty members represented in the 2018 National Design Awards,” said Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “That the recognition is for two innovators in different departments and at different stages of their careers is a testament to the overall depth of our faculty’s expertise and to the breadth of their influence and innovation in the field of design.”</p>
<p>Spirn’s Design Mind award recognizes innovation and visionary individuals who have had a profound impact on design theory, practice, and public awareness. The Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Spirn is an author, landscape architect, and photographer. Her first book, “The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design” (Basic Books, 1984) is listed as one of the 100 most influential and important books in the 20th century by the American Planning Association and credited with launching the ecological urbanism movement.</p>
<p>“We could not be more proud of Anne and the National Design Award’s recognition of her level of influence in integrating urban and natural environments, not only for designers and planners, but for the general public,” said Eran Ben-Joseph, head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “Anne’s work has been transformative for how we all see, act, and value our surroundings, which is a profound contribution to design theory and practice.”</p>
<p>Oxman’s expertise in the design of interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services was recognized with the Interaction Design award. The Sony Corporation Career Development Professor, Oxman is the founder of the Mediated Matter research group, which combines design rooted in the natural world with science and technological innovation. The integration of computationally derived form and biological inspired fabrication is known as the field of material ecology — a term and field pioneered by Oxman.</p>
<p>“All 10 of this year’s winners present a powerful design perspective and body of work that is at once inclusive and deeply personal, accompanied by great achievement, humanity and social impact,” Cooper Hewitt Director Caroline Baumann said in a prepared statement.</p>
<p>The other award winners included: Gail Anderson for&nbsp;Lifetime Achievement,&nbsp;Design for America for&nbsp;Corporate and Institutional Achievement,&nbsp;WEISS/MANFREDI for&nbsp;Architecture Design,&nbsp;Civilization for&nbsp;Communication Design,&nbsp;Christina Kim for&nbsp;Fashion Design,&nbsp;Oppenheim Architecture + Design for&nbsp;Interior Design,&nbsp;Mikyoung Kim Design for&nbsp;Landscape Architecture,&nbsp;and Blu Dot for Product Design.</p>
<p>Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is one of 19 museums that comprise the Smithsonian Institution and the only museum in the United States dedicated to historical and contemporary design. Founded in 1896, Cooper Hewitt began the National Design Award in 2000 as an official project of the White House Millennium Council. The annual awards celebrate design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world and seek to increase national awareness of the impact of design.</p>
<p>A gala to celebrate the winners will be held at the Arthur Ross Terrace and Garden at Cooper Hewitt in New York City on Oct.&nbsp;18.</p>
Anne Whiston Spirn (left), the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, has been honored with the Design Mind award by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Neri Oxman (right), the Sony Corporation Career Development Professor, received the Interaction Design award.Left photo courtesy of Anne Whiston Spirn; Right photo: Noah KalinaAwards, honors and fellowships, Architecture, Design, Urban studies and planning, Digital technology, Media Lab, School of Architecture and PlanningJ-WAFS awards over $1.3 million in fourth round of seed grant fundinghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/j-wafs-fourth-round-seed-grant-funding-0525
Eleven principal investigators from six MIT departments will receive grants totaling over $1.3 million, overhead free, for research on food and water challenges.Fri, 25 May 2018 12:00:01 -0400Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Labhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/j-wafs-fourth-round-seed-grant-funding-0525<p>Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) at MIT announced the award of over $1.3 million in research funding through its seed grant program, now in its fourth year. These grants, which are available to the MIT community, are the cornerstone of MIT’s Institute-wide effort to catalyze solutions-oriented research in water and food systems that target the safety and resilience of the world’s vital resources.&nbsp;</p>
<p>This year, seven new projects led by eleven faculty PIs across six MIT departments will be funded with two-year grants of up to $200,000, overhead free. The winning projects include a silk-based food safety sensor; research into climate vulnerability and resilience in agriculture using biological engineering as well as crop modeling and sensors; an archeological and materials engineering approach to understanding fertile tropical soils; and three different strategies for water purification and management.</p>
<p>The reach of the J-WAFS’s seed grants across the Institute is wide and reflects how faculty from all schools at MIT are invested in addressing the critical challenges that face our most essential global resources. This J-WAFS call for seed research proposals attracted 54 principal investigators, nearly twice the number that submitted proposals in 2017. What is more, 38 of these PIs were proposing to J-WAFS for the first time. “The J-WAFS seed grants continue to stimulate new thinking about how to address some of our most serious water and food problems, whether by new junior faculty at MIT or senior professors,” noted Renee Robins, executive director of J-WAFS.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>Faculty from six departments were funded under this year's awards, including the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>New approaches to ensure safe drinking water</strong></p>
<p>The problem of arsenic contamination in water occurs throughout the globe, and is particularly extreme in South Asia, where over 100 million people in Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Cambodia, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Myanmar experience daily exposure to dangerous concentrations of arsenic that occurs naturally in groundwater. Yet the poorly understood behavior of arsenic in groundwater makes it challenging to identify safe sources of drinking water. Charlie Harvey, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has conducted extensive field research on &nbsp;this issue. With J-WAFS funding, Harvey will consolidate data and develop models to identify and disseminate more effective groundwater management strategies that take into account how and where dangerous concentrations of arsenic exist.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>Julia Ortony, the Finmeccanica Career Development Assistant Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, will be taking a different approach to arsenic contamination. Her lab develops molecular nanomaterials for environmental contaminant remediation. A J-WAFS seed grant will support her development of a robust, high surface-area material made of small molecules that can be designed to sequester arsenic from drinking water.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Boron is an essential micronutrient for both plants and animals, but becomes toxic at higher concentrations. However, due to its small molecular size and un-charged chemical structure, it is particularly difficult to remove with standard water purification technologies. Zachary P. Smith, the Joseph R. Mares Career Development Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, is taking advantage of advancements in molecular level synthesis of metal-organic framework (MOF) materials to open the door to a new generation of highly selective membranes for water purification and desalination that can remove boron. Leveraging techniques and expertise at the interface of inorganic chemistry, materials science, and chemical engineering, Smith aims to achieve technical breakthroughs in water purification with this J-WAFS funding.</p>
<p><strong>Improving understanding of soil and climate impacts on agriculture for improved crop production</strong></p>
<p>Climate change is bringing temperature and precipitation changes that will increasingly stress the crops our global food system depends on, and these changes will affect regions of the world differently. Breeding plants for increased resilience to stressors such as drought is one solution, but traditional breeding approaches can be extremely slow. In part, this slowness results from the complexity of plants’ response to environmental stress. David Des Marais, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, and Caroline Uhler, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science want to better understand this complexity in order to improve future practices to breed plants for stress tolerance. By combining Des Marais’ expertise in plant-environment interaction and sustainable agriculture with Uhler’s statistical approaches to studying networks, the team will develop new analytical tools to understand the structure and dynamics of the gene regulatory networks that plants use to perceive — and respond to — changes in the environment.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Dara Entekhabi, the Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, is taking another approach to understanding the impacts of climate on agricultural production. The project, in collaboration with research scientist Sarah Fletcher from MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, is focused on Sub-Saharan Africa. This region is experiencing very high population growth, and with its largely rain-fed agriculture is particularly vulnerable to anticipated temperature and precipitation changes brought about by climate change. The MIT research team is leading an academic-industry partnership that seeks to understand how crop production in the region responds to year-to-year variation in precipitation in order to assess the future of food security in Africa. They will collaborate with Radiant Earth, a startup that uses a geospatial imagery technology platform to capture and understand the impact of social challenges in the developing world, to develop a better understanding of the impact of climate on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa.&nbsp;</p>
<p>A very different approach to improving agricultural productivity involves better understanding and managing soil fertility. In another innovative multidisciplinary project, three PIs whose expertise spans geoscience, archaeology, and materials engineering will collaborate to improve our understanding of extensive deposits of rich soils known as terra preta (“dark earth” in Portuguese) in the Amazon Basin that pre-Columbian societies created and cultivated between 500 and about 8,700 years ago. Many tropical soils are nutrient-poor and contain little organic carbon, but terra preta is so carbon-rich and fertile that it is still farmed (and destructively mined) today. Researchers are now attempting to reproduce terra preta as part of a strategy for sustainable tropical agriculture and carbon sequestration. A team consisting of Taylor Perron, associate professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and Dorothy Hosler and Heather Lechtman, both professors of archaeology and ancient technology in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, aims to inform agricultural practices in tropical developing nations by investigating how the rivers of the Amazon region influenced terra preta formation.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Using edible food safety sensors to reduce food waste and disease</strong></p>
<p>While strategies to improve agricultural productivity are critical to global food security, minimizing food loss from farm to table is also considered to be necessary if we are to meet our future food needs. Cost-effective and easy-to-use methods of detecting food spoilage along the food supply chain can help. A. John Hart, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Benedetto Marelli, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, have teamed up to find a solution. J-WAFS seed funding is supporting the development of a silk-based food safety sensor, visible to the naked eye, which can change color based on its interaction with common food pathogens. The sensor will take the form of printable inks that are stable under extreme temperatures and also edible. Their aim is to print on food packaging as well as directly on food in order to enable point-of-use detection of contamination and food spoilage for meat and dairy products.</p>
<p>With these seven newly funded projects, J-WAFS will have funded 30 total seed research projects since its founding in 2014. J-WAFS’ director John Lienhard states that “investing in research results in creative innovations in food and water that will enable a sustainable future. &nbsp;Further, these seed grants have repeatedly been leveraged by their recipients to develop significant follow-on programs, that further multiply the impact.”&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>2018 J-WAFS Seed Grant recipients and their projects:</strong></p>
<p>"<a href="https://jwafs.mit.edu/research/projects/2018/novel-systems-biology-tools-improving-crop-tolerance-abiotic-stressors">Novel systems biology tools for improving crop tolerance to abiotic stressors</a>." PIs: David Des Marais, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Caroline Uhler, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Institute for Data, Systems and Society.</p>
<p>"<a href="https://jwafs.mit.edu/research/projects/2018/assessing-climate-vulnerability-west-african-food-security-using-remote">Assessing Climate Vulnerability of West African Food Security using Remote Sensing</a>." PIs: Dara Entekhabi, the Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.</p>
<p>"<a href="https://jwafs.mit.edu/research/projects/2018/printed-silk-based-colorimetric-sensors-food-spoilage-prevention-and-supply">Printed Silk-Based Colorimetric Sensors for Food Spoilage Prevention and Supply Chain Authentication</a>." PIs: A. John Hart, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Benedetto Marelli, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.</p>
<p>"<a href="https://jwafs.mit.edu/research/projects/2018/what-controls-arsenic-contamination-south-asia-making-sense-two-decades">What controls Arsenic Contamination in South Asia? Making Sense of Two-Decades of Disjointed Data</a>." PI: Charles Harvey, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.</p>
<p>"<a href="https://jwafs.mit.edu/research/projects/2018/supermolecular-nanostructure-gels-chelation-arsenic-drinking-water">Supermolecular nanostructure gels for chelation of arsenic from drinking water</a>." PI: Julia Ortony, the Finmeccanica Career Development Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.</p>
<p>"<a href="https://jwafs.mit.edu/research/projects/2018/anthropogenic-soils-amazon-origins-extent-and-implications-sustainable">Anthropogenic Soils of the Amazon: Origins, Extent, and Implications for Sustainable Tropical Agriculture</a>." PIs: Dorothy Hosler, Professor of Archaeology and Ancient Technology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Heather Lechtman, Professor of Archaeology and Ancient Technology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and J. Taylor Perron, Associate Professor of Geology, Department of Earth, Planetary and Atmospheric Sciences.</p>
<p>"<a href="https://jwafs.mit.edu/research/projects/2018/purifying-water-boron-contamination-highly-selective-metal-organic-framework">Purifying Water from Boron Contamination with Highly Selective Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) Membranes</a>." PI: Zachary Smith, the Joseph R. Mares Career Development Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering.</p>
Seven new projects focusing on solutions to water and food systems challenges, led by 11 faculty principal investigators across five MIT departments, will be funded by the Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) with two-year grants of up to $200,000.Grants, Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS), Funding, Research, Chemical engineering, IDSS, Water, Food, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Agriculture, Sensors, Desalination, Sustainability, Pollution, Materials Science and Engineering, DMSE, Invention, Environment, Developing countries, Design, School of Engineering, School of Science, EAPS, Civil and environmental engineering, J-WAFSMIT alumni curate pavilions at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennalehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-alumni-lui-kozlowski-curate-venice-architecture-biennale-pavilions-0524
Exhibitions tackle global questions with research-based approaches.Thu, 24 May 2018 16:50:01 -0400Ken Shulman | School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-alumni-lui-kozlowski-curate-venice-architecture-biennale-pavilions-0524<p>Four years ago, a team of graduate students at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning helped curator and associate professor of architecture Ana Miljacki research, plan, and mount the United States’ pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition, titled “OfficeUS,” took a comprehensive look at America’s influence in the world over the past 100 years through its architectural work abroad.</p>
<p>This year, two of those students — now alumni — are returning to Venice as curators of their national pavilions for the 2018 Biennale, open to the public from May 26 to Nov. 25. “It is an unexpected honor and opportunity to co-curate the U.S. Pavilion at this year’s Biennale, at this point in my career,” says Ann Lui SMArchS ’15, an assistant professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago who was named co-curator of “Dimensions of Citizenship,” the exhibition that will represent the United States in Venice.</p>
<p>“The call for proposals for the U.S. Pavilion was issued shortly after the inauguration of a new administration that raised urgent and troubling questions, including ones about citizenship today. I felt that architecture needed to be part of that conversation. It was a longshot. But I believe our proposal spoke to this contemporary moment.”</p>
<p>The Biennale has long been a personal goal for Gabriel Kozlowski SM ’15, selected last November to co-curate the Brazil Pavilion. “The year I joined this school was also the year that Rem Koolhaas was curating the Biennale, so I came to MIT knowing that I wanted to get to Venice,” says Kozlowski. A native of Rio de Janiero, Brazil, he holds a master’s degree in urbanism and is currently a teaching fellow in the Department of Architecture and a research associate at the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.</p>
<p>“When I arrived at MIT, I discovered that a professor was curating the U.S. pavilion, offering a course where students would help develop the support materials for that exhibit,” he says. “I learned how to understand an exhibition as a means to elaborate on specific concepts and present them in innovative ways, and to how to plan and coordinate all the production involved in a large event like this without losing sight of the broader picture. Now, just four years later, I’m in the position Ana was in. And I hope to be able offer to my younger colleagues and collaborators what she once offered me.”</p>
<p>Both Lui and Kozlowski’s 2018 Biennale projects engage with global questions that extend far beyond traditional design and planning. Lui’s “Dimensions of Citizenship” will examine the concept of citizenship across a variety of scales, ranging from the cosmos to the human body. Each of its seven elements offers a detailed look into a global issue such as climate change, migration, sovereignty, or the future of the nation-state through a specific case study. “We intend to ask two questions,” says Lui. “What does it mean to be a citizen today? And what is the role of architecture to help research, understand, and render visible these questions of what it means to belong?”</p>
<p>Kozlowski’s project, titled “Muros de Ar” (Walls of Air), explores ways to visualize and understand walls — both concrete and conceptual — that have constructed the Brazilian territory and its society, in relation to the broader context. Moving from global scale to that of the architectural object, the pavilion will feature mappings of Brazil’s human and material flows (immigration/emigration patterns and the movement of commodities across the country), the relation between artificial and natural ecosystems, the implications of Brazil’s political borders, the geography of the country’s real estate market, and the physical limits within its cities. The exhibit promises to be austere; Kozlowski and his three co-curators have chosen to eschew the ubiquitous 3-D renderings, photos, videos, and animations, electing instead to articulate their vision exclusively in line drawings and maps.</p>
<p>Lui and Kozlowski’s project represent a sizeable shift in how architecture presents itself, both to the profession and to the world at large. Lui, who had Miljacki as her thesis advisor at MIT, believes that shift began in part in 2014 with “OfficeUS.” “Ana and her co-curators presented architecture in an unprecedented way, as a discipline of active research, both historical and in the production of the resident exhibitors,” says Lui, who along with her teaching job is co-founder of Future Firm, a Chicago-based architecture firm. “She and the team showed me — and everyone who saw the 2014 exhibit — that history is an ongoing act of construction. I learned that historical research can also be a practice, just like the practice of design.”</p>
<p>The selections of Lui and Kozlowski come as no surprise to their former mentor and current colleague. Yet she is reluctant to take any credit. “Perhaps the experience of working on a project as big in scale as our 2014 exhibit prepared them for their current roles,” says Miljacki, whose own research interest include architecture in Cold War Eastern Europe and the politics of contemporary architectural production. “But even then, they were incredibly competent colleagues, people I could turn to with a problem and know they would find a solution. And they were both great architectural thinkers, each in their own way. They’re just amazing.”</p>
Ann Lui (left) is co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion and Gabriel Kozlowski is co-curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale.Photos: Nancy Wong and Michelle MendlewiczSpecial events and guest speakers, Italy, Architecture, Alumni/ae, Global, Arts, Design, School of Architecture and PlanningFleet of autonomous boats could service some cities, reducing road traffichttps://news.mit.edu/2018/fleet-autonomous-boats-service-cities-reducing-road-traffic-0523
Researchers design 3-D-printed, driverless boats that can provide transport and self-assemble into other floating structures.Wed, 23 May 2018 14:00:00 -0400Rob Matheson | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/fleet-autonomous-boats-service-cities-reducing-road-traffic-0523<p>The future of transportation in waterway-rich cities such as Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Venice — where canals run alongside and under bustling streets and bridges — may include autonomous boats that ferry goods and people, helping clear up road congestion.</p>
<p>Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), have taken a step toward that future by designing a fleet of autonomous boats that offer high maneuverability and precise control. The boats can also be rapidly 3-D printed using a low-cost printer, making mass manufacturing more feasible.</p>
<p>The boats could be used to taxi people around and to deliver goods, easing street traffic. In the future, the researchers also envision the driverless boats being adapted to perform city services overnight, instead of during busy daylight hours, further reducing congestion on both roads and canals.</p>
<p>“Imagine shifting some of infrastructure services that usually take place during the day on the road — deliveries, garbage management, waste management — to the middle of the night, on the water, using a fleet of autonomous boats,” says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus, co-author on a paper describing the technology that’s being presented at this week’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.</p>
<p>Moreover, the boats — rectangular 4-by-2-meter hulls equipped with sensors, microcontrollers, GPS modules, and other hardware — could be programmed to self-assemble into floating bridges, concert stages, platforms for food markets, and other structures in a matter of hours. “Again, some of the activities that are usually taking place on land, and that cause disturbance in how the city moves, can be done on a temporary basis on the water,” says Rus, who is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.</p>
<p>The boats could also be equipped with environmental sensors to monitor a city’s waters and gain insight into urban and human health.</p>
<p>Co-authors on the paper are: first author Wei Wang, a joint postdoc in CSAIL and the Senseable City Lab; Luis A. Mateos and Shinkyu Park, both DUSP postdocs; Pietro Leoni, a research fellow, and Fábio Duarte, a research scientist, both in DUSP and the Senseable City Lab; Banti Gheneti, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Carlo Ratti, a principal investigator and professor of the practice in the DUSP and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab.</p>
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<p><strong>Better design and control</strong></p>
<p>The work was conducted as part of the “<a href="http://senseable.mit.edu/roboat/">Roboat</a>” project, a collaboration between the MIT Senseable City Lab and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS). In 2016, as part of the project, the researchers <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/autonomous-fleet-amsterdam-roboat-0919">tested</a> a prototype that cruised around the city’s canals, moving forward, backward, and laterally along a preprogrammed path.</p>
<p>The ICRA paper details several important new innovations: a rapid fabrication technique, a more efficient and agile design, and advanced trajectory-tracking algorithms that improve control, precision docking and latching, and other tasks.&nbsp;</p>
<p>To make the boats, the researchers 3-D-printed a rectangular hull with a commercial printer, producing 16 separate sections that were spliced together. Printing took around 60 hours. The completed hull was then sealed by adhering several layers of fiberglass.</p>
<p>Integrated onto the hull are a power supply, Wi-Fi antenna, GPS, and a minicomputer and microcontroller. For precise positioning, the researchers incorporated an indoor ultrasound beacon system and outdoor real-time kinematic GPS modules, which allow for centimeter-level localization, as well as an inertial measurement unit (IMU) module that monitors the boat’s yaw and angular velocity, among other metrics.</p>
<p>The boat is a rectangular shape, instead of the traditional kayak or catamaran shapes, to allow the vessel to move sideways and to attach itself to other boats when assembling other structures. Another simple yet effective design element was thruster placement. Four thrusters are positioned in the center of each side, instead of at the four corners, generating forward and backward forces. This makes the boat more agile and efficient, the researchers say.</p>
<p>The team also developed a method that enables the boat to track its position and orientation more quickly and accurately. To do so, they developed an efficient version of a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) algorithm, generally used to control and navigate robots within various constraints.</p>
<p>The NMPC and similar algorithms have been used to control autonomous boats before. But typically those algorithms are tested only in simulation or don’t account for the dynamics of the boat. The researchers instead incorporated in the algorithm simplified nonlinear mathematical models that account for a few known parameters, such as drag of the boat, centrifugal and Coriolis forces, and added mass due to accelerating or decelerating in water. The researchers also used an identification algorithm that then identifies any unknown parameters as the boat is trained on a path.</p>
<p>Finally, the researchers used an efficient predictive-control platform to run their algorithm, which can rapidly determine upcoming actions and increases the algorithm’s speed by two orders of magnitude over similar systems. While other algorithms execute in about 100 milliseconds, the researchers’ algorithm takes less than 1 millisecond.</p>
<p><strong>Testing the waters</strong></p>
<p>To demonstrate the control algorithm’s efficacy, the researchers deployed a smaller prototype of the boat along preplanned paths in a swimming pool and in the Charles River. Over the course of 10 test runs, the researchers observed average tracking errors — in positioning and orientation —&nbsp;smaller than tracking errors of traditional control algorithms.</p>
<p>That accuracy is thanks, in part, to the boat’s onboard GPS and IMU modules, which determine position and direction, respectively, down to the centimeter. The NMPC algorithm crunches the data from those modules and weighs various metrics to steer the boat true. The algorithm is implemented in a controller computer and regulates each thruster individually, updating every 0.2 seconds.</p>
<p>“The controller considers the boat dynamics, current state of the boat, thrust constraints, and reference position for the coming several seconds, to optimize how the boat drives on the path,” Wang says. “We can then find optimal force for the thrusters that can take the boat back to the path and minimize errors.”</p>
<p>The innovations in design and fabrication, as well as faster and more precise control algorithms, point toward feasible driverless boats used for transportation, docking, and self-assembling into platforms, the researchers say.</p>
<p>“Having swarms of robots in the canals of Amsterdam is a great idea,” says Javier Alonso-Mora, an assistant professor in the Cognitive Robotics Department at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research. “Twenty percent of the surface in the Netherlands is water, and robots can be an efficient mode of transportation and logistics. This is a first step in that direction, with a very nice prototype that is able to move in all directions and connect with other boats to build temporal structures. Together with the team at MIT we are now looking at the next steps in autonomy, including multirobot coordination and urban navigation.”</p>
<p>A next step for the work is developing adaptive controllers to account for changes in mass and drag of the boat when transporting people and goods. The researchers are also refining the controller to account for wave disturbances and stronger currents.</p>
<p>“We actually found that the Charles River has much more current than in the canals in Amsterdam,” Wang says. “But there will be a lot of boats moving around, and big boats will bring big currents, so we still have to consider this.”</p>
<p>The work was supported by a grant from AMS.</p>
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab have designed a fleet of autonomous boats that offer high maneuverability and precise control. Courtesy of the researchersResearch, Robotics, Robots, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Computer science and technology, Autonomous vehicles, Transportation, Sensors, Design, 3-D printing, Urban studies and planning, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), School of Architecture and Planning, School of EngineeringCS+HASS SuperUROP debuts with nine research projectshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/cs-hass-superurop-debuts-nine-research-projects-0515
In yearlong program, MIT students apply computer science to humanities, arts, and social science research.Tue, 15 May 2018 16:10:01 -0400School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/cs-hass-superurop-debuts-nine-research-projects-0515<p>Trade policy, government transparency, and music composition systems were among the humanities, arts, and social science (HASS) research areas explored this year by students in MIT’s Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, better known as the SuperUROP.<br />
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These and similar HASS-related research projects materialized because the SuperUROP — which launched in 2012 in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) — was extended to support research projects in MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Thanks to a generous grant from an anonymous donor, nine students <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2018/showcasing-results-students-real-world-research-0515">participated in the yearlong program</a> as CS+HASS Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholars.</p>
<p>“The cool thing about CS+HASS is that a lot of computer science is not yet applied to the social science and humanities fields,” says Samir Dutta, a junior in computer science with a minor in economics. “You are combining two fields that haven’t been combined that much in the past, so it’s a great opportunity to find new things. You’re pioneering a new type of analysis.”<br />
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<strong>Pioneering students </strong></p>
<p>Dutta’s SuperUROP project involved applying machine learning and big data analysis to a dataset of more than 10 billion tariff rate observations with the goal of better understanding the economic and political determinants of tariffs. “His research advances our understanding of the interaction between political institutions and product-level polices,” says In Song Kim, an assistant professor of political science and one of Samir’s SuperUROP advisors.</p>
<p>Mikayla Murphy, a senior in civil and environmental engineering who is minoring in computer science, says that using computer science to advance political science research “felt different” from anything she had done before. For her SuperUROP, Murphy worked on a MIT GOV/LAB’s project examining local U.S. government websites and rating them for transparency. Her task was to automate the data analysis system to produce useful fact sheets for government officials and the public.<br />
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“Being able to do this cross-disciplinary project applying CS to political science has definitely been very interesting,” she says. “I had seen how science labs operate, but in a political science lab it’s different. Seeing how my advisor [F. Daniel Hidalgo, the Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor of Political Science] approaches problems and wants to release all this information to the public — which is not always the goal of scientific research — has been cool.”<br />
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<strong>A deep dive for undergraduates</strong></p>
<p>The SuperUROP program consists of a two-semester course, 6.UAR (Seminar in Undergraduate Advanced Research), and at least 10 hours a week in the lab — making it a deep dive into research that is a new experience for many undergraduates.<br />
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“This is my first super-real-serious research endeavor, so it’s been a crazy learning experience,” says Jacob Higgins, a junior in comparative media studies who did his SuperUROP with Professor D. Fox Harrell, who has appointments in both Comparative Media Studies and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “Being able to interact with people much further along on their journey as researchers is so valuable to me just starting out.”<br />
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For his project, Higgins worked on a tool for applications such as Chimeria Grayscale, a video game intended to spark reflection on topics like sexism in the workplace. The tool is designed to automate the work of developers by ensuring interactive narratives take different paths in response to user inputs.<br />
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“It’s a lot of human-computer interaction,” Higgins says, noting that the work called for a truly interdisciplinary skillset. “I did a lot of coding and computational thinking, including applying the fundamentals of software construction I learned in 6.031 to implement the tool. And, from the humanities side, the critical analysis I’ve done in Comparative Media Studies prepared me to think of stakeholders and evaluate tools using metrics that are correct for this kind of interdisciplinary, human-computer interaction field.”<br />
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The first nine CS+HASS SuperUROP research projects are: "Does Democracy Cause Free Trade?" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/emma-bingham/" target="_blank">Emma Bingham</a>; "Eye-Tracking Experiment on Reading Patterns of Non-Natives" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/run-chen/" target="_blank">Run Chen</a>; "Spectacles: Assisting Speculative Analysis in Active Archives" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/peter-downs/" target="_blank">Peter Downs</a>; "Linking the Political and Economic Determinants of International Trade with Tariff Rate Data" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/samir-dutta/" target="_blank">Samir Dutta</a>; "Dynamic Background Music for Action Adventure Video Games" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/patrick-ikedi-egbuchulam/" target="_blank">Patrick Egbuchlam</a>; "Video Games for Social Issues" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/jacob-higgins/" target="_blank">Jacob Higgins</a>; "Digital Governance: Using Big Data to Measure Government Transparency Online" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/mikayla-ida-murphy/" target="_blank">Mikayla Murphy</a>; "Theatryc: A New Theater-Arts Communication Platform" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/nitah-nyangate-onsongo/" target="_blank">Nitah Nyang'ate Onsongo</a>; and "Real-Time Audio Synchronization" by <a href="https://superurop.mit.edu/scholars/smriti-pramanick/" target="_blank">Smriti Pramanick</a>.</p>
<h5><em>Story prepared by SHASS Communications<br />
Editorial and Design Director: Emily Hiestand<br />
Senior Writer: Kathryn O'Neill</em></h5>
“Realizing that I could leverage my technical background in computer science to drive innovation in the theater arts motivated me to be part of the CS+HASS-SuperUROP,” says Nitah Nyang’ate Onsongo. “I hope to gain a better understanding of the scope of the communication breakdown within the theater field and help revolutionize how theater is received by society.”Photo: Gretchen Ertl Classes and programs, Arts, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Computer science and technology, Economics, Humanities, Political science, Social sciences, Students, Research, SuperUROP, Theater, Global Studies and Languages, Video games, School of Engineering, School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs)Stepping on stage with Beyoncéhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-alum-joe-brown-stepping-on-stage-with-beyonce-0514
Joe Brown &#039;07 has become a successful choreographer and dancer, most recently performing with Beyoncé at this year&#039;s Coachella Music Festival.Mon, 14 May 2018 13:10:01 -0400Nicole Morell | MIT Alumni Associationhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-alum-joe-brown-stepping-on-stage-with-beyonce-0514<p>If you tuned in for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/15/entertainment/beyonce-coachella-performance/index.html" target="_blank">Beyoncé’s headlining performance</a>&nbsp;at the Coachella Music Festival this past month, you may have spotted a familiar face on stage: Joe Brown ‘07. The choreographer and professional dancer was among dozens of performers who delivered a show that he says was, “Everything I’ve been working for—a celebration of everyone involved.”</p>
<p>For those who know Brown, his Coachella debut comes as no surprise — he’s been dancing professionally for several years and even appeared with his crew as part of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJdr3V-w0TI" target="_blank">NBC’s&nbsp;<em>World of Dance</em></a> — but professional dance wasn’t always the plan. “My goal was to be the next Walt Disney,” Brown explains. “I majored in Course 2 [mechanical engineering] because I wanted to design rollercoasters and to create my own theme park.”</p>
<p>Brown’s passion for dance comes from growing up with a sister who performed on Broadway. “Watching her, the love of dance just seeped in,” he remembers. He began choreographing in high school and continued to build his skills as step master of his fraternity while at MIT. But it wasn’t until after graduation that dance became a bigger part of Brown’s life. “I joined [MIT’s competitive hip hop team]&nbsp;<a href="http://ridonk.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Ridonkulous</a>&nbsp;post-graduation and it really connected me to the dance community at large, including to the whole professional dance community in Los Angeles,” he says.</p>
<p>Brown became a part of that community as he pursued his master of architecture at&nbsp;<a href="https://sciarc.edu/" target="_blank">SCI-Arc</a>&nbsp;in Los Angeles, balancing study and studio time with teaching dance and performing. “I would travel from my classes downtown to North Hollywood every day to choreograph my own style,” he says. Brown’s style combines step — where dancers use their body as an instrument of percussion and movement — with different dance styles. Coined “<a href="http://www.strollgroove.com/" target="_blank">stroll groove</a>,” the style would fit right in on stage with Beyoncé.</p>
<p>As&nbsp;<a href="http://msaagency.com/portfolio/joe-brown/" target="_blank">a professional dancer</a>, Brown splits his time between teaching classes, choreographing, and professional dance jobs for video shoots and stage shows with artists like Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. So when he found out about an audition for a secret project, he jumped at the opportunity. “Word on the street was that it was for Beyoncé,” he says. Weeks after the audition as other dancers found out they made the cut, Brown didn’t hear anything. “I just assumed I didn’t get it and was ready to move on,” he says. Then the call came from Beyoncé’s camp. “At first I didn’t even know what show the call was for, so when they said it was for Beyoncé, I had to take a moment,” he says.</p>
<p>That call came in December, and soon after, Brown began contributing choreography and learning moves for the Coachella show that revealed itself bit by bit. “You’re given a direction and you don’t know what the whole picture looks like until you’re on stage,” Browns says. “Once we started doing the full run-throughs, the ‘epic-ness’ of it started to seep in.”</p>
<p>That epic-ness would be a two-hour long, tour-caliber set that paid tribute to black culture, from song selections to traditions of historically black fraternities and sororities — something Brown says was especially important for him. “They created a show that pretty much represented my whole life — from the stepping to a lot of the cultural aspects, and even to some songs that my parents would play for me back in the day,” he says. “It was profound.”</p>
<p>Brown’s own fraternity experience lent itself to his show, part of which included a probate stepping performance, mimicking the presentation done by new members of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. “One of my dance goals is to put stepping back on the map,” he says. “This was like a milestone for people to see; it kind of hit people in the face and said ‘this is it, this is what stepping is.’”</p>
<p>Brown says though his days are filled with dance, he’s still passionate about design and gets to experience it in a different way as a dancer. “There’s so many technical, cutting-edge aspects of performance and a stage; I walk around with my sketchpad drawing and think, ‘One day I might love to work on an apparatus like that for my next project,’” he says. “It’s like my playground.”</p>
<p>For Brown, it’s all inspiration for his next act. “That roller coaster is still going to happen. That theme park is still going to happen,” he says. “But right now, I just want to spend some time with dance.”</p>
Joe Brown '07 (second from left) performs with Beyoncé and her dance team at Coachella 2018.Photo courtesy of Beyonce.com.Alumni/ae, Arts, Music, Student life, Clubs and activities, Mechanical engineering, School of EngineeringSpinning data into soundhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-collaboration-uses-nuclear-fusion-data-to-create-music-paradiso-resynthesizer-0509
An interdepartmental collaboration brings out the music of nuclear fusion.Wed, 09 May 2018 10:50:00 -0400Paul Rivenberg | Plasma Science and Fusion Centerhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-collaboration-uses-nuclear-fusion-data-to-create-music-paradiso-resynthesizer-0509<p>It could be the background soundtrack for a science fiction movie. Some sounds bubble up like prehistoric chirps from primordial ooze. Others whirl up and down octaves, quickly joined by a progressive rattling that slinks across the sound landscape.</p>
<p>“That’s C-Mod’s data!” says Professor&nbsp;Joe Paradiso, director of the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT&nbsp;Media Lab. “That sch-sch-sch-sch. Like a snake.”</p>
<p>Or like chattering insects, or a New Year’s Eve noisemaker.</p>
<p>Paradiso is using a modular synthesizer to translate data into artful sound —&nbsp;specifically data from one of the final fusion experiments on the Plasma Science and Fusion Center’s (PSFC) Alcator C-Mod tokamak. Late on Sept. 30, 2016, this experiment set the plasma pressure record for a magnetically confined fusion device. To emphasize the connection between the scientific data and the soundscape it augments, Paradiso has temporarily located his project at the PSFC near the cell where Alcator C-Mod is still housed.</p>
<p>“That’s the beauty of having it here,” he enthuses. “It’s a great space; it has the right ambiance. It’s very inspirational.”</p>
<p>The installation, entitled&nbsp;“Resynthesizer,”&nbsp;is a collaboration between the Department of Nuclear Science and&nbsp;Engineering, the <a href="http://act.mit.edu/">Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT)</a>, the <a href="http://www.psfc.mit.edu/">PSFC</a>,&nbsp;and the <a href="http://www.media.mit.edu/">Media Lab</a>. The partners in the&nbsp;project are offering&nbsp;a month-long series of public tours of the synthesizer and the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at the PSFC, intending to promote dialogue between the varying departments, and the public, concerning interdisciplinary research efforts directed towards one of the 21st century’s most pressing challenges: to produce the next clean, economically efficient, and sustainable energy.</p>
<p>Nuno Loureiro, a nuclear science and engineering professor&nbsp;who was instrumental to locating the synth at the PSFC, sees a conversation beginning.</p>
<p>“This is one of those rare instances where we are connecting parts of campus that don’t traditionally talk to each other,” he says. “And that’s exciting for everybody, especially the students. They are intrigued to think about art in the context of science, and science in the context of art.”</p>
<p>The Paradiso Synthesizer, arguably the world’s largest homemade modular synthesizer, produces sounds&nbsp;which have been programmed&nbsp;manually by running wires between various outputs and inputs. Unlike today’s digital synthesizers, which normally hide their many capabilities behind menus or graphical interface screens that allow for changing only one parameter at a time, the modular synthesizer exposes all aspects of sound creation and modification simultaneously via the physical modules.</p>
<p>The modules produce complex and varied sonic environments from a complicated patch&nbsp;—&nbsp;or&nbsp;set of connections — that Paradiso creates. The patch determines the sounds, as well as how they are controlled and triggered, ensuring that the sonic environment generated by the synthesizer will never be repeated.</p>
<p>To create his atmospheric soundscapes, Paradiso modifies the sounds in several ways.</p>
<p>“Once it is converted to audio, I process the C-Mod data with various effects, including clocking it at different rates, as well as dynamically selecting data files made from different variables from the experiment,” he says.</p>
<p>Paradiso says he was inspired by the haunting sound of C-Mod data to “fortify this mood” with other modified and heavily processed sounds, some taken from oscillators and speech generators, as well as triggered elements from commercial keyboards,&nbsp;but much of this sound is also modulated and controlled by C-Mod data.</p>
<p>“I tried to keep it,&nbsp;not dark, but more mysterious,” he says. “I couldn’t make it happy. It’s not really happy. It’s otherworldly.”</p>
<p>Paradiso&nbsp;plans to install new and different patches at intervals over the next weeks, possibly altering the mood of the work.</p>
<p>Loureiro sees parallels between this sonic art and fusion research.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“With the synth, minor changes in the patch produce completely different outcomes, just as in fusion experiments slight changes to a variable creates a completely different fusion reaction. Both are nonlinear systems that can behave completely differently depending on the input,” he says.</p>
<p>Paradiso, who introduced the resynthesizer in April as part of ACT's <a href="http://act.mit.edu/projects-and-events/cavs-50th-anniversary-events/">50th Anniversary celebration of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies</a>&nbsp;(CAVS), says he was pleased with the process and the results.&nbsp;Having spent hours setting up the synthesizer near the C-Mod cell, he even became fond of the omnipresent noise of a vacuum pump and exhaust fans, despite his early concern that they would interfere with his own soundscape. Now he plans to sample the background noise of the C-Mod cell for inclusion in future compositions. Because&nbsp;he completed his PhD in experimental high-energy physics here at MIT in 1981, he says he feels at home around a physics experiment.</p>
<p>“It’s great to be an artist —&nbsp;it’s too easy these days to let my students have all the creative fun. I want to make more pieces with it and it and build out its repertoire,” he says. He proposes a jam session with students from the Media Lab joining PSFC researchers for musical encounters with the synthesizer. Graduate students who have studied C-Mod data for their own PhD theses could be jamming with it before the end of the month, collaborating with that data in a whole new way.</p>
<p>Public tours of the facility and installation are available Wednesday evenings from 6:30 - 7:30 p.m. through June 6. The tours are cooperatively led by a team of ACT and PSFC graduate students holding special interest in and knowledge of the project. Tours are&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/resynthesizer-public-tours-tickets-45532607254?ref=elink">scheduled</a>&nbsp;and are&nbsp;limited to 20 attendees at a time.</p>
<p>Anyone interested in hearing more can visit the&nbsp;resynthesizer online for what it&nbsp;is currently <a href="http://synth.media.mit.edu/">streaming</a>.</p>
Outside the cell of MIT's Alcator C-Mod tokamak Professor Joe Paradiso listens to the sound of the fusion experiment's data, processed by his unique modular synthesizer.Photo: Paul RivenbergMedia Lab, Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Fusion, Nuclear science and engineering, Arts, School of Architecture and PlanningMIT returns to the Venice Architecture Biennalehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-returns-to-venice-architecture-biennale-0504
Faculty, students, and alumni contribute as curators and exhibitors at the world’s premier forum for architecture and design.
Fri, 04 May 2018 12:40:01 -0400School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-returns-to-venice-architecture-biennale-0504<p>MIT faculty, students, and alumni will make significant contributions as exhibitors and curators at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Considered one of the foremost global forums for architecture and the built environment and drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world, the Architecture Biennale takes place every two years in Venice, Italy.</p>
<p>MIT-related participants are represented across the Biennale’s broad presence in Venice, from the official exhibition and national pavilions in the Arsenale and Giardini areas in the eastern end of the Venetian island to the collateral exhibitions and installations hosted around the city.</p>
<p>Curated by Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, the Biennale’s main exhibition is entitled FREESPACE. The title refers to “a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture's agenda, focusing on the quality of space itself,” Farrell and McNamara state in a manifesto on the Biennale website.</p>
<p>This year’s event, the 16th international architecture exhibition organized in Venice, will be open to the public May 26 - Nov. 25. Participants from the MIT community include:</p>
<p><strong>U.S. Pavilion: Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, and Ann Lui SM ’15 </strong></p>
<p>The theme of the U.S Pavilion’s exhibition is “<a href="http://dimensionsofcitizenship.org/" target="_blank">Dimensions of Citizenship</a>.” Among the seven architecture and design teams selected for participation is <a href="http://design-earth.org/">Design Earth</a>, the practice of Ghosn, an assistant professor of architecture and urbanism in the Department of Architecture, and Jazairy, a research scientist in the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.</p>
<p>Lui, who received a master of science in architecture studies from MIT in 2015, is one of the pavilion’s co-curators. She is co-founder of <a href="https://future-firm.org/">Future Firm</a> and an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.</p>
<p><strong>Brazilian Pavilion: Gabriel Kozlowski SM ’15</strong></p>
<p>The Brazilian Pavilion’s exhibition, “Walls of Air,” explores ways in which to read and transgress the material and immaterial boundaries of Brazil and its architecture. As one of the pavilion’s co-curators, Kozlowski led an <a href="https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/iap-2018-4185" target="_blank">architectural design workshop</a> in January at MIT to produce maps for the exhibition.</p>
<p>Kozlowski received a master of science in architecture studies (SMArchS Urbanism) from MIT in 2015. He is currently a teaching fellow and research associate in the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (<a href="http://lcau.mit.edu/">LCAU</a>).</p>
<p><strong>Lithuanian Pavilion: Gediminas Urbonas, Nomeda Urbonas</strong></p>
<p>Gediminas Urbonas is an associate professor in the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology. He and Nomeda Urbonas, an ACT affiliate, are curators and organizers of the Lithuanian Pavilion and its theme, “the Swamp.”</p>
<p>Headquartered in the Giardino Bianco Art Space in the Castello district, the Swamp program will involve exhibitions, performances, sound transmissions, installations, and other activities in various locations around Venice through November. The Swamp team includes numerous graduate students, researchers, and others from multiple departments within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.</p>
<p><strong>Canadian Pavilion: Réjean Legault PhD ’97</strong></p>
<p>The Canadian Pavilion is celebrating the historic renovation of its building at this year’s Biennale with an exhibition, curated by Legault, entitled “Canada Builds/Rebuilds a Pavilion in Venice.” The landmark pavilion in the Giardini di Castello will officially reopen on Saturday, May 26, to mark the 60th anniversary of its construction. Legault, an associate professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, received a PhD in 1997 at MIT from the History, Theory, and Criticism section in the Department of Architecture.</p>
<p><strong>Official exhibition: Cino Zucchi ’78 </strong></p>
<p>An alumnus of the Department of Architecture, Zucchi is the chief architect of <a href="http://www.zucchiarchitetti.com/">Cino Zucchi Architetti</a> in Milan, Italy. He is one of 71 architects and designers honored by the curators with inclusion in FREESPACE, the official exhibition.</p>
<p><strong>Across Chinese Cities: James Shen MArch ‘07</strong></p>
<p>One of 12 official collateral events, “<a href="http://www.acrosschinesecities.org/">Across Chinese Cities</a>” is the third installment of an exhibition program focusing on the planning and development of urban and rural communities in China. The exhibition includes work from The People’s Architecture Office, co-founded by alumnus James Shen, who received his Master of Architecture (MArch) from MIT in 2007. Across Chinese Cities is hosted by the Università Iuav di Venezia in the Santa Croce section of the city.</p>
<p><strong>Close Encounter: Gordon Bunshaft ’33 SM ’35 </strong></p>
<p>The Biennale also includes a historical intersection with an MIT-educated architect. Accompanying the main exhibition is a special section called “Close Encounter,” which presents “works that originate in a reflection on well-known buildings of the past." One of the 16 buildings chosen for this section is the <a href="http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/about/about-building">Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library</a> at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.</p>
<p>Designed by <a href="https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/1988-bunshaft">Pritzker-Prize-winning architect Gordon Bunshaft</a>, who received undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from MIT in the 1930s, the Beinecke building is famous for its façade, made from panels of marble so thin they are translucent. <a href="http://www.hparc.com/">Heneghan Peng Architects</a>, based in Dublin, Ireland, will reflect upon Bunshaft’s design as part of this special section.</p>
The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale will be open to the public May 26 - Nov. 25.Photo: Tom Gearty/School of Architecture and PlanningSpecial events and guest speakers, Italy, Architecture, Staff, Alumni, Faculty, Global, Arts, Design, Media Lab, Art, Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture and PlanningMaker Break: A celebration of making at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2018/maker-break-celebration-of-making-at-mit-0504
Over 700 students and makers joined in the first annual participatory showcase of fabrication and crafts around the Institute.Fri, 04 May 2018 12:10:01 -0400Terri Park | MIT Innovation Initiativehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/maker-break-celebration-of-making-at-mit-0504<p>The sharp sound of steel welding, the chilling taste of liquid nitrogen ice cream, and the colorful sight of paper airplanes flying through the air, are just some of the senses that were brought to life during Maker Break, the first annual celebration of making at MIT that took place on April 17 at Johnson Ice Rink.</p>
<p>Over 700 MIT students took a much needed break from their studies and tapped into their creative sides for a full afternoon of maker-based activities and competitions. Makers of all skill levels were encouraged to try their hands at any of the 18 making stations, including 3-D scanning, jewelry making, vinyl cutting, candle making, and origami.</p>
<p>Those curious about maker machines were given demonstrations of laser cutters and CNC mills that showcased additive and subtractive manufacturing. At the machine autopsy station, students were invited to take apart power tools, appliances, and a transmission donated by sponsor Magna International, to learn about their inner workings and how they are put together. &nbsp;</p>
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<p>The makers also had the chance to engage in a number of friendly competitions with fellow students. Whether challenged to erect a catapult to get an egg to travel the farthest distance without breaking it, or build a remote control (RC) car in 90 minutes using a range of novel parts — from a radio and receiver to popsicle sticks and zip ties — for a race around the course in the fastest time possible while overcoming obstacles like the rumble zone and cone city, the competitors were required to be resourceful and inventive for the win. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Dan Dorsch, a mechanical engineering PhD candidate and the winner of the RC car tournament, appreciates the increasing presence of opportunities for makers on campus, especially ones that allow students to apply their skills in a fun and low-stress way. “I enjoyed getting involved in Maker Break and seeing other students experience the wide variety of activities. Events like this are a great way to bring makers together, and can lead to interesting collaborations on a variety of cool projects afterwards.”</p>
<p>The fun and imaginative spirit of making was clearly evident throughout the day and embraced by the MIT community. Participants were rewarded with lunch from a selection of food trucks, including Roxy’s Grilled Cheese, Tenoch Mexican, and Frozen Hoagies, and an appearance by MIT’s beloved mascot Tim the Beaver put a big smile on everyone’s face. &nbsp;</p>
<p>For Verena Hehl, a graduate student majoring in linguistics, the best part of Maker Break was the “opportunity to do something with your hands.” She adds, “It was really nice to have such a huge choice of materials&nbsp;like different beads and origami, something you just don’t have as an individual. I spent over three hours there and could have stayed longer!”</p>
<p>Organized by Project Manus — MIT’s initiative to upgrade makerspaces and foster maker communities — which ran focus groups and brainstorming sessions with students, shop managers, and administrators to plan the event, the idea for Maker Break was to broaden the scope of making beyond what is traditionally thought of as the purview of engineers and technicians.</p>
<p>“Making is about communities engaging in sewing, building theater sets, and creating jewelry as well as fabricating with 3-D printers, laser cutters, lathes, and other shop tools and equipment,” says Martin Culpepper, professor of mechanical engineering and MIT’s Maker Czar. “The emphasis on communities also highlights the importance of celebrating the process of making, not necessarily the end result.”</p>
<p>Based in the MIT Innovation Initiative, Project Manus also runs the popular Maker Lodge training program, where experienced student mentors train new students on how to safely use equipment found in makerspaces and introduce them to maker communities on campus.</p>
<p>Maker Break was generously sponsored by Magna International, the global automotive manufacturer and supplier.</p>
Students get hands-on at Maker Break, the first annual celebration of making at MIT.Photo: Casey AtkinsSpecial events and guest speakers, maker movement, Arts, Design, Mechanical engineering, Student life, Community, Innovation Initiative, 3-D printing, School of EngineeringWhat will we eat in the year 2050?https://news.mit.edu/2018/what-will-we-eat-in-year-2050-0430
Climate Changed Symposium combines art and science to envision the global food system under climate change. Mon, 30 Apr 2018 17:15:01 -0400Mark Dwortzan | MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Changehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/what-will-we-eat-in-year-2050-0430<p>How might climate change alter the global food system by the year 2050? Will diets change to reflect a revamped agriculture designed to adapt to a warming world? MIT Joint Program Principal Research Scientist <a href="https://globalchange.mit.edu/about-us/personnel/monier-erwan" target="_blank">Erwan Monier</a> and New York University artist <a href="http://www.alliewist.com/" target="_blank">Allie Wist</a> grappled with these questions as they developed a dinner menu for the MIT <a href="http://climatechangedmit.com/" target="_blank">Climate Changed</a> Symposium, a two-day gathering of experts in the sciences, humanities and design focused on the role and impact of models in a changed climate.</p>
<p>Co-sponsored by the&nbsp;<a href="https://environmentalsolutions.mit.edu/" target="_blank">MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative</a>&nbsp;and the&nbsp;<a href="https://sap.mit.edu/" target="_blank">MIT School of Architecture and Planning</a> and organized by <a href="https://architecture.mit.edu/student/irmak-turan" target="_blank">Irmak Turan</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://architecture.mit.edu/student/jessica-varner" target="_blank">Jessica Varner</a>, the <a href="http://climatechangedmit.com/#symposium" target="_blank">symposium</a> — along with an ideas <a href="http://climatechangedmit.com/#objectives" target="_blank">competition</a> and multimedia <a href="http://climatechangedmit.com/#exhibition" target="_blank">exhibition</a> — examined how past, present, and future climate-related models can enable us to understand and design the built environment as significant changes unfold in the Earth system through and beyond mid-century.</p>
<p>Held at Café ArtScience in Kendall Square, the symposium dinner consisted of four courses, each representing a different landscape. Signifying the forest, the appetizer was a trio of dried, preserved, and foraged mushrooms, fungi known to help the soil store carbon dioxide and thus slow the pace of climate change.</p>
<p>The next two courses included two options — the first symbolizing more comfortable conditions that climate models project will prevail, on average, by the year 2050 under an ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction policy; the second suggesting more hardscrabble environments that the models indicate will likely result in the absence of climate action. For the first course, representing the desert, the choice was between a squash tart with sorghum honey or cactus fruit gel with dehydrated fruits. For the second, representing the ocean, all diners got to eat wild striped bass, with one half receiving their fish filleted and the other half having to contend with bones.</p>
<p>Suggesting melting sea ice and glaciers in an Arctic landscape, the dessert was a pine milk parfait infused with pine smoke and topped with fresh berries and a juniper tuile. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>“Our menu selections were designed to reflect the idea that the impact of climate change on various landscapes will vary widely based on the level of climate action that will take place between now and the year 2050,” said Monier.</p>
<p>Prior to the dinner, Monier and Wist delivered a brief presentation on the complexity of modeling the global food system and the visualization of future food landscapes.</p>
<p>Monier noted that to address this complexity, Joint Program researchers integrate a diverse set of models that simulate different aspects of the food system, from atmospheric chemistry to water resource management to crop yields. He then highlighted three key challenges in modeling climate change over the coming decades.</p>
<p>First, how much climate change will we experience? Climate policy scenarios range from business-as-usual to stringent, translated for symposium guests as a more challenging or more comfortable dining experience. Second, how will different regions experience climate change? Monier observed that climate models project crop-yield increases and decreases for different regions of Africa — and that uncertainty in the models can produce a wide range of projections for some regions. This was translated into different landscape storylines for each of the four courses. Finally, how will we adapt to climate change?</p>
<p>“Depending on the severity of climate change, we will either be able to adapt to maintain our current diet,” said Monier, “or need to introduce or intensify the use of different drought-tolerant food sources such as seaweed and cactus.”&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>Monier also appears in the Climate Changed Exhibition, a work curated by Jessica Varner, Irmak Turan, and Irina Chernyakova, and produced by artist Rainar Aasrand and designers from <a href="http://www.omnivorous.org/" target="_blank">Omnivore</a>. The exhibition is a continuous-loop multimedia exploration of how computational models and design practices have enabled people to represent, understand, assess, communicate, and act upon climate change. On view April 6-May 19 in the Keller Gallery (Room 7-408), it shows how the feedback process between climate models and design has evolved since the development of the first general circulation model in the 1960s.</p>
<p>In multiple interview segments, Monier describes how Earth-system models of different resolution are used to assess environmental change at global and regional levels. He explains how the Joint Program’s signature Integrated Global System Modeling (<a href="https://globalchange.mit.edu/research/research-tools/global-framework" target="_blank">IGSM</a>) framework models different components of the Earth system and how they interact, and projects the impact of global environmental change (including climate change) on both Earth and human systems under different climate policy scenarios and degrees of uncertainty about the climate’s response to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.</p>
Signifying the forest, the Climate Changed Symposium dinner appetizer was a trio of dried, preserved and foraged mushrooms — fungi known to help the soil store carbon dioxide and thus slow the pace of climate change. Photo: OmnivoreSpecial events and guest speakers, Food, Climate change, Sustainability, Earth and atmospheric sciences, Environment, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, EAPS, Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, ESI, Agriculture, Policy, School of Science, Design, ArtsMaking landmark texts in architecture and urban studies accessible to the worldhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-press-neh-mellon-humanities-open-book-program-grant-0427
National Endowment for the Humanties-Mellon Foundation Open Book Program grant will support the digitization and open accessibility of key MIT Press titles.Fri, 27 Apr 2018 12:15:00 -0400MIT Presshttps://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-press-neh-mellon-humanities-open-book-program-grant-0427<p>The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant of $157,000 to support the digitization and open accessibility of landmark out-of-print architecture and urban studies titles published by the MIT Press.&nbsp;By digitizing a cohesive set of classic architecture and urban studies texts from formative and influential moments in these fields, the MIT Press will be surfacing a significant set of works for discovery and research by the scholarly community.</p>
<p>“Bringing these out-of-print texts to the scholarly community and making them accessible to a wider public reflects their importance as intellectual resources and our mission to re-imagine university-based publishing,” says MIT Press Director Amy Brand.&nbsp;“The MIT Press has a longstanding commitment to architecture and urban studies, and we are honored to have The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supporting this project under the Humanities Open Book Program.”</p>
<p>The&nbsp;award is jointly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Mellon Foundation. It provides the MIT Press with a unique opportunity to digitize a collection of image-rich and intellectually prized architecture and urban studies titles with complex and costly third-party permissions requirements.&nbsp;Drawing from the expertise of an advisory board of editors, librarians, and scholars who will finalize the list of titles to be digitized, the MIT Press will also commission new forewords for these distinctive works.</p>
<p>Among the titles that the press will digitize are sought-after classics like Francoise Choay’s&nbsp;“The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism,” which bridges classical and Renaissance architecture with modern theory, and John Templer’s two-volume&nbsp;“The Staircase”<em>&nbsp;</em>— the first theoretical, historical, and scientific analysis of one of the most basic and universal building elements: the stair. The press&nbsp;will also make available works by or about leading figures in modern architecture, notably Donald Leslie Johnson’s&nbsp;“Frank Lloyd Wright vs. America: The 1930s,” an examination of a difficult but important decade in the life of the architect;&nbsp;“H.H. Richardson and His Office,” focused on the drawings of the architect by one of the leading Richardson historians; and Grant Hildebrand’s&nbsp;“Designing for Industry: The Architecture of Albert Kahn”<em>&nbsp;</em>and&nbsp;several of his important books on classical architecture, including&nbsp;“On Leon Battista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories,” a study of a quintessential man of the Renaissance.</p>
<p>Bridging the MIT Press architecture list with the press’s focus on technology are two important works by professor of architecture and MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte:&nbsp;“The&nbsp;Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment,”<em>&nbsp;</em>and its companion&nbsp;“Soft Architecture&nbsp;Machines.” These long out-of-print books — which operate&nbsp;at the intersection of architecture, systems theory, and artificial intelligence — are early exemplars of the MIT Press’s interdisciplinary publishing program.</p>
<p>Once the project is complete, MIT Press intends to distribute a minimum of 25-30 titles under Creative Commons licenses via several channels, including its own&nbsp;institutional ebook platform.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>“We are excited by the MIT Press’ vision to make these texts accessible.&nbsp;The press has an excellent list of titles in architectural theory, landscape architecture building on the legacy of Frederick Law Olmstead, and urban studies and planning, to name a few of their strengths,” says&nbsp;Anna Boutin-Cooper, MIT’s librarian for the School of Architecture and Planning and an advisory board member on the project.&nbsp;“The project’s focus on titles of the greatest importance and highest quality in architecture and urban studies, and the fact that image-rich materials will be prominent in this project, is a highly anticipated moment for scholars and students.”</p>
An MIT Press digitization project will make available works by or about leading figures in modern architecture, such as Donald Leslie Johnson’s "Frank Lloyd Wright vs. America: The 1930s," an examination of a difficult but important decade in the life of the architect.Image courtesy of MIT Press.Architecture, Books and authors, MIT Press, Urban studies and planning, School of Architecture and Planning, Media Lab, Grants, Digital humanitiesFeatured video: Making music with the Chorallaries of MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2018/featured-video-making-music-with-mit-chorallaries-0425
For students in MIT&#039;s oldest co-ed a capella group, blending voices provides a creative outlet and a chance to share their love of song.Wed, 25 Apr 2018 11:10:37 -0400MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2018/featured-video-making-music-with-mit-chorallaries-0425<div class="cms-placeholder-content-video"></div>
<p>How do you transform emotion from the soul, through the body, to the voice, and elicit a physiological response from the audience? Mechanical engineering senior Isabel "Izzy" Lloyd and fellow members of the MIT <a href="http://web.mit.edu/choral/www/" target="_blank">Chorallaries a capella group</a> figure out this complex transformation every time they get together and sing.</p>
<p>One of only 20 groups worldwide to be selected to appear on the prestigious <a href="https://varsityvocals.com/project/boca-2018/" target="_blank">Best of College Acappella (BOCA) album for 2018</a>, the Chorallaries are a force to be reckoned with in the a cappella community. For Lloyd, music is a way to relax, reset, and release — to switch off the mathematical equations and tune in to the art and connections of music.</p>
<p>"I think it's important to realize the value that lies at the intersection of art and science and how it pertains to society and life and culture all around us," Lloyd says. "The&nbsp;ability relax and reset with music, to make something beautiful together, and to be able to share it with others, inspires me, and helps me parse out my life a little bit so I can focus on my work as an engineer."</p>
<p><em>Submitted by: Carolyn Blais | Video by: Lillie Paquette | 5 min, 26 sec</em></p>
Chorallaries of MIT a cappella group on stage at the Kresge AuditoriumPhoto: Lillie Paquette/MIT School of EngineeringClubs and activities, Students, Student life, Music, Arts, Mechanical engineering, School of Engineering, Featured video